What is Political Theory For?

Benjamin Boudou

Presses de Sciences Po | « Raisons politiques »

2016/4 No 64 | pages 7 - 27
ISSN 1291-1941
ISBN 9782724634549
This document is the English version of: Benjamin Boudou, « À quoi sert la théorie
politique ? », Raisons politiques 2016/4 (No 64), p. 7-27.
Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations
Available online at :
https://www.cairn.info/article-E_RAI_064_0007--what-is-political-theory-for.htm

Benjamin Boudou, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study
of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in the department of Ethics, Law and Politics. He is
editor-in-chief of the journal Raisons Politiques and is a former lecturer at Sciences Po.
He is the author of Politiques de l’hospitalité: une généalogie conceptuelle [Politics of
Hospitality: A Conceptual Genealogy] (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017), and Penser les
frontières: philosophie politique de l’immigration [The Boundary Dilemma: The
Political Philosophy of Immigration] (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2018
(forthcoming)).

Abstract

In this paper, the author argues that political theory should be part of political science,
especially in France where political theory is largely undermined and underrepresented.
He begins with an analysis of the job market for political theorists, showing the
disproportion between the number of “qualified” (by the National Council of
Universities) young doctors in political theory and the number of positions. He then
poses the problem of the usefulness of political theory, both for other social sciences
and society in general, and argues that the legitimacy of political theory comes from
the fulfillment of four essential functions: heuristic, educational, critical, and ethical.
 The only reason to teach political theory is the conviction that a complete person
must be able to think intelligently about government, and that the only way to
rise above banality is to learn to think one’s way through the works of the great
writers on the subject and to learn to argue with them. To see how political ideas
fit into the republic of letters generally, into the political systems within which
they took place, and finally to see what is dead and alive within this accumulated
wealth of psychological and social speculation is to be intellectually
transformed, and to have something completely and immediately relevant to
think about at any time of the day. If I did not believe that, I would quit teaching
at once and go into business.
Judith Shklar1

This article examines the place of political theory within French political science so as
to better understand its role and its heuristic function. To avoid reducing the enthusiasm
for theory to what Hume called the “passion for hypotheses” as opposed to “fact and
observation,” 2 or inversely granting theorists a monopoly on thinking, we will
emphasize points that are common to the different approaches to politics. In so doing
we hope to show that theory does indeed have its place in political science, and that the
crisis of legitimacy it is currently undergoing is the result of a misunderstanding of its
functions. In the first part we present a review of appointments made and theses passed
in political theory, to demonstrate its minoritarian situation and the mistrust in which it
is held. In examining the relationship between theory and politics, we then pose the
problem of the usefulness of the discipline: what and whom should it serve? Finally,
we defend theory on the basis of the functions that it fulfills. We put forward four such
functions: heuristic, pedagogical, critical, and ethical.
In bringing to light these four functions of political theory, we seek to provide some
answers: firstly to the questions of students just beginning their training in political
theory, who continually ask whether what they are doing makes sense and corresponds
to their ambitions; but also to skeptical political scientist colleagues, who demand a
justification for this disciplinary approach before even considering its results; and
finally to those who do political theory but doubt their usefulness, or suffer from seeing
their normative ambitions constrained by practice and their political ambitions
constrained by the demands of theory.

Political Theory Is Not an Empire within an Empire

To ask after the use of a discipline is a symptom of a certain anguish; to seek to convince
others that it is useful is to admit defeat. It is quite evident that French academia is not

1
Judith Shklar, “Why Teach Political Theory?,” in Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now, ed. James
Engell and David Perkins (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 154.
2
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett,
1983), 16.
convinced by political theory, even if it continues to entice students. There are two
possible explanations for this. Either it is merely an unfortunate consequence of the
position of research within France and the funding allocated to it; or else there is a
specific problem with political theory—a lack of legitimacy of the subdiscipline itself
or of the candidates. The valuable work done by the Association française de science
politique [French Political Science Association] allows us to know the number of
academic posts, the CNRS’s recruitment policies and the everyday battles fought by a
so-called discipline rare. The detailed reports of section 4 of the Conseil national des
universités [National Council of Universities—CNU] inform us about the composition
of the discipline, in particular through changes in the number of thesis qualifications.
Given this essential work, it would be redundant to give a general panorama of the
discipline here. We seek only to give a more precise idea of the situation of political
theory so as to justify our approach in this article.
Consider the last five years: an average of less than one post per year was advertised in
political theory (four posts out of just under one hundred in total, including those posted
mid-year, from 2011 to 2015) for a total of 37 qualified candidates—that is, around
13% of doctors qualified in political science. There is therefore a disproportion between
the number of posts and the number of qualified candidates. In comparison, just over
forty posts were advertised in political sociology, for 151 qualified candidates, a more
even ratio (around 40% of posts for around 40% of the qualified candidates), with
international relations even better served (in terms of the ratio of qualified candidates
to posts). Obviously, the specification of posts is not dictated by the rates of
qualification, yet such a wide gap is problematic and reveals the frailty of the
subdiscipline. (We should note that we have disregarded posts in political or social
philosophy relating to section 17, since the agrégation in philosophy is an implicit
requirement for recruitment to these posts.) More surprisingly, it is in political theory
that the standard deviation is the greatest: it has the greatest year-on-year variation in
qualification rate, going from 11% to 60%, and then to 37%. Shouldn’t we clarify the
criteria for judging political theory, then? Here we cannot neglect the institutional and
personal quarrels,3 which, it is always worth remembering, primarily affect those in the
most precarious positions. Disagreeing on method is one thing, waging a war of attrition
with ATERs (Attachés Temporaires d’Enseignement et de Recherche—Temporary
Teaching and Research Assistants) and using candidates for qualification and post-
doctorates as cannon fodder is entirely another. But the under-representation of the
discipline and the arbitrariness of a rate of qualification that doubles from one year to
the next indicate something more profound than the harsh realities of academic
politics—namely, a lack of recognition, or even an absence of legitimacy.
In making this hypothesis, however, we must not overlook two other factors. Firstly,
this is a situation that is specific to France, where the separation between philosophy

3
See for example the opinion columns of Bernard Lacroix and Daniel Gaxie in Le Monde, February 22,
2013 (respectively entitled “Rendez-vous raté avec les sciences sociales” and “Des savoirs qui
s’enseignent surtout à l’université”), and the response by Alain Dieckhoff, Jean-Marie Donegani, and
Marc Lazar on March 1 (“Oui il y a bien de la science politique à Sciences Po”).
and the human sciences (in particular sociology) has become something of a settling of
scores centering around figures such as Pierre Bourdieu, with the respective camps
becoming radicalized accordingly. In France we continually return to the partition of
positivism vs. metaphysics, objectivity vs. normativity, and science vs. speculation.
Here we will try to free ourselves from these dichotomies. They may produce relevant
analyses on the very meaning of the intellectual enterprise of political theory and the
role of normativity,4 but may be costly under the current situation of domination in
relation to political science. To consign political theory to the humanities on the pretext
that, unlike science, it is wholly and completely normative, is to challenge the deep
filiation that exists in France between political science—and the social sciences in
general—and theory, and thus to exacerbate the marginalization of the latter.
Neither should we deny the fact that theory is intellectually inscribed within political
science. The Revue Française de Science Politique (RFSP) regularly publishes articles
relating to the subdiscipline, and theoretical theses continue to be passed. Only the
proportions are in question: only 5 percent of articles published in the RFSP relate to
political theory,5 and of the 1,145 theses collected in the central theses file (theses.fr)
and passed between 2006 and 2015, we find just over sixty relating to political theory.
Finally, let us note, over the same period, more than 300 theses relating to political
philosophy were passed in philosophy (of 1,634 in total).
These few statistics describe the situation of a subdiscipline struggling to escape an
ultra-minoritarian situation, giving the impression of a battle already lost. The retreat
of this subdiscipline that supposedly took itself for an empire is an understandable
consequence of such a situation. At the risk of caricature, young political theorists in
France are reduced to seeing themselves as a guild of artisans, caretakers of a useless
tradition and craft. Inversely, elsewhere in the world, they can be fully integrated, no
longer held responsible for justifying a recognized discipline. As a corrective to this
sentiment, we will present the functions of political theory, so as to demonstrate its
importance and legitimacy. With the proviso that “legitimate” does not necessarily
mean “useful,” since this is a problematic designation.

Must Political Theory be “Useful”?

The question of usefulness is often posed to researchers—from “Why do a thesis on. .
.” to “In your research project you will indicate socioeconomic impacts. . .”; but it
affects different disciplines in different ways.6 Political theory shares with the human

4
Aurélia Bardon, “Normativité, interprétation et jugement en théorie politique,” Raisons politiques 55
(2014): 103–119.
5
Manuel Cervera-Marzal, “Vers un retour de la philosophie politique dans la Revue française de science
politique? Le difficile espace d’une sous-discipline de la science politique française (1951–2010),”
Raisons politiques 54 (2014): 141.
6
See Tiphaine Rivière’s amusing Carnets de thèse (Paris: Seuil, 2015) and Alain Resnais, On connaît la
chanson [Same Old Song] (Arena Films, 1997); and, more seriously, Jeremy Waldron, “What Plato
Would Allow,” Nomos 37, Theory and Practice (1995): 178.
sciences a tension between its object, which relates to common sense, and its method;
between the “political” and its “theoretical” approach to it. It may be easy to understand
why inequalities are a problem, but it is less straightforward to employ concepts such
as the “difference principle” (John Rawls) or the “part with no part” (Jacques Rancière)
to address them.
These are difficult questions because they involve the sociology and epistemology of a
profession that is deeply divided as to its methods and objects. Jean Leca gives a good
description of what might almost be described as a disciplinary state of nature:
In its current usages, political theory is no longer so much a paradigm as a
scientific (or cognitive) collective: it is not a social construct that allows us to
resolve enigmas by giving us a “way of seeing things.” This is not only a matter
of the classic situation in the social sciences where a multiplicity of paradigms
prohibits the constitution of a normal science, but of the coexistence of opposed
traditions that make it impossible to even create a field where competitive
paradigms might confront one another. It is not a “dialogue of the deaf” because
it is not a dialogue at all: to be interested in the history of ideas, the logical
constitution of discourse, the explanation of a process, or the ethical status of a
doctrine (or a practice) are fundamentally different activities.7
In this Kuhnian vein, a harsher interpretation might have it that political theory quite
simply failed to join the paradigm shift that took place over the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, during which sociology gradually became independent from philosophy.8 All
that remain are a few intransigents who cling to the old paradigm, and who will
therefore be gradually eliminated from the profession.9 And yet arguments can be made
to defend a certain practice of political theory that would allow us to affirm its
usefulness for society in general and for political science in particular.
The aim is thus to propose a roadmap. Although methodological discussion is
inevitably all the more arduous when it is not just methodological, it becomes relevant
when it presents itself as a deontological necessity: If I want to do what I want to do,
here are the requirements and the metatheoretical ambitions (What is the point of doing
this theory?) to which I aspire. Now, there is a relatively rich body of theorists who
have undertaken this task, for methodological, pedagogical, or polemical ends (and
sometimes all three at once). Even though the 1960s were marked by widespread
defeatism, as evidenced by the repeated announcement of the death of political theory,10

7
Jean Leca, “La théorie politique,” in Traité de science politique, vol. 1, eds. Madeleine Grawitz and
Jean Leca (Paris: PUF, 1985), 76.
8
Bruno Karsenti, D’une philosophie à l’autre. Les sciences sociales et la politique des modernes (Paris:
Gallimard, 2013).
9
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012), 19.
10
See Brian Barry, “The Strange Death of Political Philosophy,” Government and Opposition 15, nos.
3-4 (1980): 276–288, where the author catalogues the various views of the death of political theory. In
1956, Peter Laslett declared: “For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.” The same was
true, in 1958, for Robert Dahl: “In the English-speaking world, where so many of the interesting political
problems have been solved (at least superficially), political theory is dead.” We could also cite Isaiah
Berlin: “[it is suggested] that political philosophy, whatever it may have been in the past, is today dead
or dying” (“Does Political Theory Still Exist?,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, second series, eds.
numerous innovations, from the work of John Rawls to the contemporary renewal of
realism, by way of theories of power, multiculturalism, feminism, deliberation, conflict,
immigration, and so on, have demonstrated the great vigor of political theory. This
renewed capacity to pose problems has been accompanied by continual reflection on
the conditions of doing political theory, its historical role, its relation to law, to facts,
to authors, and so on—in short, its usefulness.
Another way of approaching the problem of the usefulness of political theory is to
examine the relationship between theoretical activity and political activity. After all,
Marx told philosophers to stop interpreting the world and start changing it, and he was
firmly opposed to the division of labor between intellectuals and workers (in the
broadest sense). 11 In other words: to be useful, doesn’t theory have to lead to
engagement? Must writing on misdeeds and inequalities or on the disgraceful treatment
of refugees be correlated with action on the ground, so as to put its theoretical
arguments into practice? To answer in the positive does not entail a renunciation of
axiological neutrality, which is a matter of the place of convictions in theoretical work
and in teaching.12 It is rather a question of the social and political role of the theorist,
and her supposed responsibility (and thus usefulness) in relation to civil society.
Two symmetrical arguments allow us to respond that the usefulness of political theory
is not necessarily to be looked for in political practice, without necessarily branding the
latter as toxic to scientific activity. The substance of these arguments can be found in
Spinoza:
Therefore, while theory is believed to be at variance with practice in all practical
sciences, this is particularly so in the case of political theory, and no men are
regarded as less fit for governing a state than theoreticians or philosophers.
Statesmen, on the other hand, are believed to aim at men’s undoing rather than
their welfare, and they have a reputation for cunning rather than wisdom. No
doubt experience has taught them that there will be vices as long as there are
men.13
In other words, a militant (or an activist, or a statesman) will not necessarily be better
for being a theorist, because these vocations require a specific knowhow that has no
need of theory to serve the cause. And a theorist is not necessarily a good statesman,
precisely because she lacks this knowhow. In what does her activity consist, then? First
of all in producing knowledge. This has long been called “discovering the truth”; let us
now say, less naively, that it involves improving our understanding of a phenomenon.

Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman [Oxford: Blackwell, 1962], 1), or Judith Shklar: “the grand tradition
of political theory that began with Plato is [. . .] in abeyance” (After Utopia: The Decline of Political
Faith [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958], 272).
11
See, recently, Manuel Cervera-Marzal, Pour un suicide des intellectuels (Paris: Textuel, 2016).
12
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, eds. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong,
trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2004), 1–31, and in particular Isabelle
Kalinowski’s excellent contextualization of the reception of axiological neutrality in the French
translation: Max Weber, La science, profession et vocation (Paris: Agone, 2005), “Leçons weberiennes
sur la science et la propaganda,” 191sq.
13
Baruch Spinoza, “Political Treatise,” in Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel
Shirley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2002), 676–754: 680.
And that this activity can be highly political—in its choice of subjects, the emancipation
that it enables, the action that it suggests.
Bas van der Vossen develops this argument further, in showing the numerous effects
of political bias on research in theory. He also explains why the will to transform the
world need not take precedence over the professional ethics that demands we develop
the best arguments and correct interpretations. Although it may be impossible to speak
the “truth” of political phenomena—as MacIntyre rightly says, bring together four
theorists, and you will get at least five interpretations of one and the same fact14—it is
nevertheless possible to evaluate interpretations and grade them from the most
interesting, or relatively correct, to the most excessive and incoherent. Van der Vossen
therefore insists that theorists should participate in public debates, producing reasoning
that can be appropriated by activists, but without becoming activists themselves, which
would have negative effects upon their work:
I am urging, then, for a division of labor. It is the job of political philosophers to
find out the correct principles for politics. It is the job of activists to implement
these. The focus of each should be firmly on their respective tasks. Activists
should not produce political philosophy but consume it. Philosophers should
produce political philosophy worth consuming.15
We can supplement this argument, which may seem somewhat conservative, with two
nuances. On one hand, to infer from “theorists should not be activists” that “activists
should not be theorists” is to say the least debatable. In reality, it is far less a matter of
separation than one of dialectic: these are two distinct activities, but this does not mean
that the individuals who practice them are distinct. All of the great political thinkers
were activists in their own way, something that does not at all detract from the quality
of their arguments. Plato advised the tyrants of Sicily, Aristotle was the tutor of
Alexander the Great, Machiavelli spent a long period of his career in political affairs in
Florence and sought to advise the Medicis, Hobbes was a tutor at the English court in
exile during the Civil War, Locke wrote the constitution of Carolina, Rousseau was
invited to draft the constitutions of Poland and Corsica, Tocqueville was deputy of the
Manche département and member of the Constituent Assembly in 1848, and so on.
Moreover, these authors’ ideas were subversive enough for them to be pursued by those
in power: Locke, Hobbes, and Marx became exiles, Rousseau spent time in prison, and
the Jewish community in Amsterdam banished Spinoza. Although van der Vossen may
be right to denounce the cognitive biases that partisan convictions can impart to

14
Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Indispensability of Political Theory,” in The Nature Of Political Theory, ed.
David Miller and Larry Siedentop (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 25.
15
Bas van der Vossen, “In Defense of the Ivory Tower: Why Philosophers Should Stay Out of Politics,”
Philosophical Psychology 28, no. 7 (2016): 1055. Cf. Bernard Manin’s similar but more overtly
separatist proposition: “Theorists, driven by various motivations (not necessarily that of exerting an
influence) formulate ideas or theories which then form an available stock upon which actors can draw
depending on their needs of the moment” (“L’idée de démocratie délibérative dans la science politique
contemporaine. Introduction, généalogie et éléments critiques. Entretien avec Bernard Manin,” Politix
57 [2002]: 42).
apodictic thought, the figure of the disengaged philosopher upon whom historical and
political circumstances must have no hold does not really exist.
On the other hand, following a critical logic, it is possible to see the theorist as an
activist by virtue of his very disengagement. Beyond the Sartrean adage (“not to be
engaged is still a form of engagement”), what is at issue here is a legitimate critique of
the way in which political theory is done. Both analytical theory and liberal theory have
been denounced for the same reasons: they are so cut off from the political conditions
that their argumentative mode hides the reality of domination. Theorists have been
called “dangerous social actors” who contribute to the injustices of the world. They
privilege argumentative rhetoric over political action, and reinforce domination by
“analytically” suspending its conditions.16
It is difficult to find a middle position in this debate. Neutrality being impossible, it is
better to avoid both glorifying the ivory tower on the grounds of a good division of
labor, and judging the usefulness of the theorist by his or her involvement in some
public cause. The resolution of the problem is doubtless more personal than theoretical.
In such questions, theory cannot pass abstract judgment on the well-foundedness of
engaged action. It is thus not so much Plato’s usefulness as a philosopher or as a
political advisor that we must judge, but rather the personal justifications he gives for
his actions. On one hand he affirms that he went to tutor the tyrant Dionysius of
Syracuse through fear of “see[ing] myself at last altogether nothing but words, so to
speak—a man who would never willingly lay hand to any concrete task” (Letter VII,
328c).17 On the other, if the political regime is corrupt, then the philosopher must make
this known, but without necessarily taking up arms against it: “When it is impossible
to make the constitution perfect except by sentencing men to exile and death, he must
refrain from action and pray for the best for himself and for his city” (331d).18 In other
words, Plato is subtler than is sometimes thought, when he is reduced to the idea of the
philosopher-king, or denied any thirst for action or for the plurality of human affairs.
Here it is the fear of being complicit in violence that renders the philosopher reluctant
to act.

The Functions of Political Theory

Rather than distinguish the disciplinary subcategories within political theory (history
of ideas, normative theory, interpretative theory, and so on), 19 we must identify the

16
In fact, this argument aims rather to divide good political theory from bad, that which proceeds from
idealization on the basis of the real and in order to think the real from that which confines itself in a
poorly-constructed idealization. See Charles Mills, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” Hypatia 20, no. 3
(2005): 165–184; Burke Hendrix, “Political Theorists as Dangerous Social Actors,” Critical Review of
International Social and Political Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2012): 41–61.
17
Plato, The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 1578.
18
Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 1580.
19
Leca, “La théorie politique,” 76–77; Andrew Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory,” Perspectives on
Politics 8, no. 2 (2010): 475.
functions of political theory. It would be difficult to define it according to its method,
since political theory mobilizes many methods, even if it evidently shares the
problematizing approach proper to all human and social sciences.
John Rawls proposed a similar approach, and defined the roles played by political
philosophy, but his proposition remains unsatisfactory: on one hand because it is too
dependent upon his own work, and on the other because it resembles the caricature
drawn by his adversaries, partisans of critical or agonistic theory.20 Of the four roles
that he puts forward (a practical role, the role of orientation, that of reconciliation, and
that of the delimitation of what it is possible to hope for and to do), three tend to
legitimate the liberal democratic consensus. Whether it is a matter of justifying the
nation-state, convincing oneself of the rationality of institutions, or believing in the
possibility of a reasonably just democratic regime, here political theory seems by its
very nature to legitimate the status quo, even if Rawls, of course, denies doing so.
The four functions presented below are doubtless not exhaustive, but certainly are not
separable: any work must concern itself with fulfilling, at a minimum, all of these tasks.

Heuristic Function
The first aim of political theory is to make sense of what is happening—that is to say,
to grasp situations in order to extract from them concepts and critical issues that will
help us to understand them. In this sense political theory is no different from any
scientific enterprise: its aim is to inquire so as to make the world more intelligible. The
analytical loop is simple enough. (1) Set out from a problematic situation, from a fact
that worries us, either because it is insufficiently intelligible or because it is
incompatible with the factual and axiological fabric that surrounds it. (2) Inquire into
this situation within a more or less determinate theoretical framework (determinate
enough to formulate questions, indeterminate enough for the object to contribute to the
development of the framework). (3) The result will often prove not so much a solution
to the problem as a clarification, or a discovery of its conditions of possibility.21
This overly broad approach allows us to identify two conditions. Firstly, political theory
plays a part in generating a better understanding of the world. It therefore postulates on
one hand that the world is knowable, on the other that it exists independently of the
observer. These methodological postulates protect us from radical skepticism. That the
world is uncertain and that our understanding of it depends upon contingent or human

20
John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 10–11; John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 1–5.
21
Michael Oakeshott, “What is Political Theory?,” in What is History? And Other Essays (Exeter:
Imprint Academic, 2004), 392: “‘Theorizing’ is not validating or ‘proving’ a conclusion reached, it is a
procedure of discovery or enquiry. It is, briefly, the urge to inhabit a more intelligible or a less mysterious
world.”
criteria is one thing; to claim that the world is in fine totally impenetrable or that it is
never anything but the projection of my own subjectivity is entirely another.22
On the other hand, as John Austin writes, when I say, “there is a goldfinch in the
garden,”
I don’t by any means always know whether it’s one or not. It may fly away before
I have a chance of testing it, or of inspecting it thoroughly enough. This is simple
enough: yet some are prone to argue that because I sometimes don’t know or
can’t discover, I never can.23
In other words, accepting that we can doubt the criteria of our knowledge (I know that
it is a goldfinch) and even the criteria of existence (there is a goldfinch) does not prevent
us from saying something, taking this existence to be true and our knowledge of it to
be viable until proof to the contrary is found. If the goldfinch were to quote Virginia
Woolf (the example is Austin’s), then what I have said about it must be false or useless,
and I must review my definition of a goldfinch. Similarly, if I am in fact only dreaming
that I am writing, this does not prevent me from continuing to write. If there is another
dimension to which our senses are blind, this does not prevent us from continuing to
live in our three dimensions. Insofar as we cannot maintain two perspectives at once—
I dream but I know that I am dreaming, I live in three dimensions but I observe that
there is a fourth—and do not have to coexist with individuals capable of doing so—
people who have access to the totality of the world in all of its dimensions, or who
watch us as we dream our existence—skeptical doubt is not a practical hindrance to our
social, ethical, and political experience. The mystery of the world and of the human
soul can only be the argument of those who have some interest in ensuring that the
scientific enterprise is not pushed too far.24 No one is intimidated by the mysterium
tremendum et fascinans, and the social construction of reality does not at all prevent a
firm, sufficiently shared construction from holding and constituting what we call a fact.
Let us come back to the idea of the problem as a point of departure for inquiry. What
is a problem? A problem should not be understood as a default, a danger, or a simple
difficulty to which would correspond a solution that would make it disappear. This
would be a positivist or mathematizing version of thought: to a problem there
corresponds a solution, which, once found, annuls the problem. Such a conception
might work for science, but not for theory in general. As Jacques Bouveresse explains
in relation to the specificity of philosophy,
In philosophy itself, one is only ever confronted with possible solutions, which
have the peculiarity that they remain possible or usable at any moment, albeit at
the price of a certain remanipulation—but never real solutions. Unlike what is

22
In this sense, constructivism is unsurpassable on condition of recognizing that, if the world is not
knowable outside of categories for knowing it, there exist facts more or less solidified by experience.
See Cyril Lemieux, “Peut-on ne pas être constructiviste?,” Politix 100 (2012): 169–187; Hilary Putnam,
The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
23
John L. Austin, “Other Minds” [1946], in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 44–84:
56.
24
Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory,” 471.
 generally the case for the sciences, the problems remain, and one has an essential
need of history to know what the possible solutions are. We might say that the
available philosophical solutions never become impossible; but none of them is
imposed or will ever impose itself as the only possible solution.25
A political problem is distinguished from a philosophical problem by its domain: it
concerns, in one way or another, the use of power, the modes of selection and range of
action of those who operationalize it, the type of relation it establishes, the construction
and deconstruction of the legitimacy of these relations, and so on. It goes without saying
that the definition of this domain is itself an object of power relations, and is thus itself
political.
A problem begins with an interpellation. In the words of John Dewey, this is a matter
of an “existential problematic situation.”26 But attending to this interpellation already
supposes a problematizing activity on our part.27 Thus a problem is always associated
with a question that must make sense of something unthought. It cannot be resolved via
a program or methodology defined in advance, otherwise it would not be a problem
worthy of scholarly attention. It implies an uncertainty.28 A problem is therefore not the
same thing as a theory, which is a chain of problems and concepts forming a coherent,
but general system. The philosopher Barbara Skarga sums it up very well:
When someone tells us that he analyzes the theory of democracy, we are
immediately beset by doubts, uncertain as to whether he means the Athenian,
socialist, or Tocquevillian theory. On the other hand, if he claims to be interested
in the problem of democracy, we understand very well what he’s driving at.29
A problem is objective insofar as it imposes itself on thought and, over time, acquires
a stability, a proper existence; but it is contextual and value-relative, insofar as a certain
body of knowledge is necessary to construct it as a problem and to give it a raison d’être
for “our” preoccupations.
A problem, in order to be perceived as a problem, must emerge; and this emergence is
aided by our knowledge, by the past, by that which thought has left us as an inheritance.

25
Jacques Bouveresse, Qu’est-ce qu’un système philosophique? Cours 2007 et 2008 (Paris: Collège de
France, new edition, 2012), <http://books.openedition.org/cdf/1715>.
26
John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, 1938), 498.
27
Here we rediscover the great teaching of Dewey: taking the indeterminate situation into consideration
signifies that the inquiry has already begun. See Dewey, Logic p. 104sq; see also Michel Fabre,
Philosophie et pédagogie du problème (Paris: Vrin, 2009).
28
“A philosophical problem,” Wittgenstein writes, “has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’” In
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),
49e. And Isaiah Berlin states “One of the surest hallmarks of a philosophical question—for this is what
all these questions are—is that we are puzzled from the very outset, that there is no automatic technique,
no universally recognised expertise, for dealing with such questions. We discover that we do not feel
sure how to set about clearing our minds, finding out the truth, accepting or rejecting earlier answers to
these questions. Neither induction (in its widest sense of scientific reasoning), nor direct observation
(appropriate to empirical inquiries), nor deduction (demanded by formal problems) seem to be of help.”
Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?,” 4.
29
Barbara Skarga, Les limites de l’historicité. Continuité et transformations de la pensée, trans.
Malgorzata Kowalska (Paris: Beauchesne, 1997), 45 [Granice historyczności (Warsaw: Państwowy
Instytut Wydawniczy, 1989)] (emphasis ours).
But what is proper to a problem is that it will call into question this epistemological
field, or prior knowledge in which we are immersed.
However, as we said, problematization is not the generalization of a skeptical doubt
that would prevent us from building on previous knowledge. We might think here of
Wittgenstein’s mouse:
If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous
generation out of grey rags and dust I shall do well to examine those rags very
closely to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there
and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these
things then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous.30
Although the inquiry begins with the problem (how did this mouse get here?), which
supposes a possible rupture in the fabric of the ordinary or of common sense (it
shouldn’t be there, but it is not so extraordinary), it is channeled by prior knowledge (I
know that this mouse didn’t appear suddenly, this approach can be abandoned given
certain confirmed biological certainties).
Such activity is a hallmark of the everyday as much as the scientific. The difference lies
simply in the valuation of the activity. Whereas one poses everyday problems in view
of solutions that appear to terminate the problem, solutions matter to scientists insofar
as they are the expressions and the relays of problems.
Neither is the continuity between scientific problematization and everyday
problematization a matter of consensus, since the idea of an epistemological break lies
at the heart of the definition of science. But if there is indeed a difference of degree
between the two types of knowledge, it is not necessarily a difference in nature. For
Alasdair MacIntyre, political theory is but a systematic and more articulate version of
common interpretations of the way in which people understand the actions of others.31
The same is true for Ellen Meiksins Wood: although political thought can also be found
in poems, novels, songs, speeches, etc., there is nevertheless a difference of degree
(rather than of nature) in political theory, which is “a systematic analytical interrogation
of political principles, full of laboriously constructed definitions and adversarial
argumentation.”32 For Waldron, also, there is necessarily a link between political theory
and political discourse in a broader sense, because both are activities of argumentation
about politics, law, economy, etc. Once again the difference is a matter of degree
(argument is systematic, intelligible to all, that is to say explicable and justifiable before
anyone)—and also, as he adds humorously, a difference in the urgency of making a
decision: “Political theory is simply conscientious civic discussion without a
deadline.”33

30
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 26e.
31
MacIntyre, “The Indispensability of Political Theory,” 23.
32
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity
to the Late Middle Ages (London: Verso, 2008), 1.
33
Waldron, “What Plato Would Allow,” 148.
Pedagogical Function
Andrew Rehfeld notes ironically that political theory is often conserved in universities
to make students read. Which is certainly true, but if this were the only reason then
theory would be part of the humanities. Its place in political science poses particular
demands in relation to the canon. Two interpretations of this issue are possible: one
consists in making reading the activity of a historian, the other in making of the history
of ideas not the object of an inquiry, but a pedagogical resource. Since we believe
political theory must address political problems (rather than just problems posed by
theorists), our preference is for the second interpretation. The history of political ideas,
as incarnated for example in the Cambridge School, belongs to history, not political
theory.
When the history of ideas takes as its object the intention of authors, it belongs to history
or to literature. When instead it is genealogical—that is to say, when it shows how
political ideas shape institutions and relations of power—then it really is a matter of
political theory. 34 We must insist on the difference between, for example, Edmund
Fawcett’s book Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, which carries out a genealogy of a
crucial idea that led to the emergence of certain contemporary political problems, and
John Dunn’s The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the
Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government.” The radically historicist stance of the
history of ideas is commendable for its advancing of historical knowledge, but cannot
seek to impose its approach to texts upon political theory as a whole.
When Quentin Skinner denounces the mythologies at work in the history of ideas, he
certainly supplies a valuable public health warning against the lazy repetition of the
“classics,” but he actually prohibits their usage. Putting aside the critique of the
inaccessibility of the ancients,35 which is more a hindrance than a help to scientific
work, the historicist approach to authors prevents our working with them as we
ourselves work. Jeremy Waldron puts it very well:
We cannot understand what Aristotle was doing in the Politics, for example,
unless we notice that among other things he thought it worth criticizing Plato’s
conceptions in the Republic and the Laws. We cannot understand the arguments
in Leviathan some eighteen hundred years later except in part as Hobbes’s
attempt to repudiate Aristotle. [. . .] In this age of exquisite hermeneutic
sensitivity, we may be anxious to avoid the anachronism of reading the
traditional texts in the light of our own concerns. But the authors whose works
we are handling with this sensitivity had no such scruples themselves, and I think
it is fair to say that our sensitivity to their context seriously distorts our

34
Rehfeld, “Offensive Political Theory,” 473.
35
For example in Isaiah Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London:
Halban, 2007), 26: “[H]ow much do we know about Athens—the mentalité, or the ways of life, in the
days of Socrates or Plato or Xenophon? [. . .] we do not know what the streets really looked like, what
kind of food they liked, what their speech sounded like, what they looked like [. . .] And yet Plato’s ideas
mean something, indeed a great deal, to us today.”
 understanding of their philosophical intentions. [. . .] [T]he authors also intended
their works to survive the historical vicissitudes that elicited them.36
The paradoxical consequence of understanding the classics only in the light of an
insular context, in large part untranslatable for the contemporary understanding, is that
it renders the tradition useless. Apart from a purely historical interest, one must do
nothing with it, lest one risk anachronistic misinterpretation. But what makes these texts
“greats” is that the propositions they make exceed the currency of their relatively closed
“theoretical space.”37 In other words, there is a persistence of problems that surpasses
the problematic context or situation within which they emerged. How can Skinner
advocate a forgotten Machiavellian freedom, how can one be Spinozist or Lockean, if
one cannot testify that, in one way or another, the problems raised by Machiavelli,
Spinoza, or Locke have a pertinence beyond the intentions of the author?
This does not mean that theorists, with an overinflated opinion of themselves, should
deign to converse only with the great Men of the past. Not all theorists are imbued with
the spirit of Machiavelli’s famous “Letter to Vettori.” 38 Fortunately, humility has
overcome this humanist heroism. The interest in not being concerned wholly with the
context lies elsewhere. Here we must follow Deleuze’s suggestion of a history of
problems, which permits at once historical work and the work of problematization.39 In
this sense, doing the history of political theory and reading the “classics” is part and
parcel of political theory, on condition that we focus on the problems rather than the
intentions of the author. These problems are not eternal, but, as Isaiah Berlin writes,
some of them “persist longer than others.”40 We continue to ask ourselves the question
“What is a just society?” because the problem of injustice and the problem of
coexistence between individuals with different aspirations are still with us. It is not a
matter, then, of asking whether Plato anticipated communism, but of showing that
reading the Republic helps us understand why it is necessary to be just.
The great texts thus play a part in the pedagogical function because they teach us to
pose problems that challenge the intelligence, but are also points of entry into an
understanding of the transformations of our relationship with power and to the political.

36
Waldron, “What Plato Would Allow,” 146–147.
37
Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992 (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2014), 71: “One of the ways of checking an idea that is proposed to you consists in checking, not
its sources in the naive sense of the term, but rather the theoretical space in relation to which this
discourse is produced.”
38
Ronald Beiner, “‘Textualism’: An Anti-Methodology,” in Political Theory: The State of the
Discipline, ed. Evangelia Sembou (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 32.
39
Gilles Deleuze, with Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z [1996] (DVD, Semiotext(e), 2011), “H
as in History of Philosophy”: “we create [concepts] as a function of problems. Well, problems evolve [.
. .] Creating concepts and constituting problems are not a question of truth or falsehood, it’s a matter of
meaning [sens] [. . .] doing philosophy is to constitute problems that make sense and create concepts that
cause us to advance toward the understanding and solution of problems.” See also Nicole Loraux, “Éloge
de l’anachronisme en histoire,” Espaces temps: Les cahiers et Clio 87–88 (2004): 129: “Anachronism
becomes necessary when the present is the most effective motor of the drive to understand.”
40
Isaiah Berlin, “European Unity and its Vicissitudes,” The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in
the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2003), 180.
They do therefore have a historical status—as Skarga writes, the great texts are in
themselves “very profound symptom[s] of change”—and a heuristic status.
One might nevertheless ask whether the canon, as well as not being diverse,41 is simply
obsolete. If political theory is political as much as it is theoretical, then the recourse to
ancient authors may simply seem pointless or even counterproductive. Günther Anders
in particular has acutely indicated this problem of dependence on the classics:
Today we can no longer be content with interpreting the Nichomachean Ethics
when we are accumulating nuclear weapons. The comical aspect of ninety per
cent of philosophy today is insurmountable. The criticisms that have been made
of me because I have philosophized without taking account of the two thousand
books of my ancestors and because I have not exploited these treasures, have
little impact on me. I use the world itself as a book, which I strive to translate
into an intelligible and effective language because it is “written” in an almost
incomprehensible language.42
Here it is philosophy, in its (somewhat caricatured) academic form, that is being
attacked. It is also in the name of such a critique that Hannah Arendt dubbed herself a
political theorist, not a philosopher: philosophy renders itself incapable of thinking
action, the unprecedented, and the real because it seeks truth, ideas, and so on.43 Once
again here we discover the problem of the responsibility of the theorist, for the question
that Anders poses also raises a moral issue: What should one write in a period of crisis?
What responsibility does the writer or philosopher have in the face of events as dramatic
as the “final solution,” fascism, the passivity of populations, or the capacity to destroy
the earth with an atomic bomb?44
The pedagogical role of political theory, in particular when it mobilizes its classic texts,
must be to define and sharpen political judgment by confronting us with particular
political problems, and with attempts (albeit often vain) to resolve them with a universal
scope. If for Hobbes and Locke the English Civil War and the question of exclusion
were problems of the day, the theories and concepts they deploy go well beyond
practical recommendations, and this is why we still read them today. It is the
permanence of problems (the problems of order, legitimacy, obedience, relations
between individual and community, minority and majority, ethics and politics, etc.) that
oblige us to commit to a work of identifying these problems, and of the evaluation of

41
See the recent call to rename departments of philosophy departments of “Anglo-European
philosophy”: <http://nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-
really-is.html>.
42
Günther Anders, “Wenn ich verzweifelt bin, was geht’s mich an? Gespräch mit Günther Anders [If I
Despair, What Does it Matter to Me?—Interview],” in Die Zerstörung einer Zukunft—Gespräche mit
emigrierten Sozialwissenschaftlern, ed. Mathias Greffrath (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979), 19–
57.
43
Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 73–103.
44
Alain Renaut has recently presented his own solution to the problem, by interrogating philosophical
resources—and their limits—in the face of the “extreme,” in particular the radical poverty he encountered
in Haiti. But despite the overt ambition of breaking with philosophy, the author continues to pursue a
Kantian line for which norms are detached from the world, and the “world of models” can be analyzed
independently of the “world of actors” (to use the terminology of Christophe Bertossi in La citoyenneté
à la française. Valeurs et réalités [Paris: CNRS, 2016], 20sq).
our subjective relationship with the political. Stanley Cavell illustrates this last point in
describing his reading of the contract theorists: the whole interest of their approach, he
says, reading Locke and Rousseau, is that it obliges us to reflect on our consent and to
examine our reasons for belonging to a political community:
The effect of the teaching of the theory of the social contract is at once to show
how deeply I am joined to society and also to put society at a distance from me
[. . .] [T]he philosophical significance of the writing lies in its imparting of
political education: it is philosophical because its method is an examination of
myself by an attack upon my assumptions; it is political because the terms of this
self-examination are the terms which reveal me as a member of a polis; it is
education not because I learn new information but because I learn that the finding
and forming of my knowledge of myself requires the finding and forming of my
knowledge of that membership [. . .] Such writing is, therefore, not likely to be
taken very seriously if it is read [. . .] as a set of prescientific jottings about
existing states.45
The goal is not erudition,46 but an education in judgment. The classics are landmarks
that must be known in order to move more adroitly within the theoretical and political
field. Even if in fact we are dealing with rationalizations or abstractions which, as we
have seen, can sometimes sin by excess of idealization, this is no excuse to do away
with them. The contour lines on a map cannot replace the painful experience of
climbing a steep incline when scaling a mountain, but it is necessary to be acquainted
with them in order to know what awaits you and, therefore, to prepare better for it.

Critical Function
The critical function of political theory rests upon the simple, optimistic idea that one
can always do better and understand better. Political theory is situated at the crossroads
of that which “is” and that which “could be.” 47 Not that which “should be,” which
would suggest too grand a claim to justification, but that which could be better than the
present situation. Political theorists take the facts into account, but believe in the
possibility of doing better. This relatively modest attitude is at the heart of the approach
generally described as realist. Authors such as Judith Shklar, Iris M. Young, Bernard
Williams, and Ian Shapiro try to mark themselves out from the overambitious
constructions that seek to rethink our institutions from top to bottom on the basis of

45
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 25.
46
Jean-Fabien Spitz, La liberté politique. Essai de généalogie conceptuelle (Paris: PUF, 1995), 11: “If
historical research results in saying in the terms of the past what we believe we know in the present, then
there is no interest in it, because it comes down to dressing up, through a concern with who knows what
respectability or historical profundity, the debates of the present by placing them within a trompe l’oeil
décor that has the appearance, but not the reality, of the past.”
47
Of course we find the same ambition in Rousseau, who opens his Social Contract as follows: “I want
to inquire whether in the civil order there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration, taking
men as they are, and the laws as they can be.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” in “The
Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 41.
general principles. For them it is more a question of identifying injustice or domination
as it is lived by the actors themselves, so as to envisage improvements which, while
perhaps marginal, are reasonable given the world as it is:
During the 1980s, many who lived in Soviet bloc countries could detail the fine
contours of their oppression, as could victims of apartheid in South Africa. Yet
they could supply only haziest accounts of what their worlds would be like
without communism or apartheid, and why they would be better. [. . .] The
inability to depict the details of a viable alternative was not a failing on their
part. It reflected the reactive character of the human condition. People reject
what is painful and oppressive in the hope that something better can be created,
even though the destination and path forward are often, perhaps congenitally,
shrouded in fog.48
Political theory must therefore supply us with the means to better identify “what will
not be accepted.”49 Not the means for perfect freedom, or the ideal foundations of a
society in which every member will remain faithful to principles decided in common
by all, but the practical conditions of domination and the institutional means to diminish
it.50 The work of theory remains crucial in order to identify what domination is, but
critical ambition has displaced a concern for the correct definition of concepts toward
the concrete evaluation of situations where a well-defined concept would allow these
situations to be improved. It is in such terms that Brian Barry recounts his experience
of a collaboration between social sciences and political theory in the creation of the
Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.51 The work of defining what constitutes social
exclusion, the identification of the “exact nature of the evil,” is at the heart of his work
as a theorist, then in opposition to that of his colleague trained in economics. Without
entering into the detail of the text, Barry demonstrates for example that a good
definition is only good if it manages to better identify the problem, and thus the
solutions. This may sound like a truism, but in gauging the practical implications of a
bad definition or a poorly-constructed normative postulate, we can understand the
importance of theoretical work.
The critical function of political theory can be summed up in the two senses that Michel
Foucault gives to “problematization.” On one hand, it is a historical process of the entry
of a problem into the “field of thought.” From the normal run of things there emerges
a problem, which is translated into concepts and data so as to be resolved. The objects

48
Ian Shapiro, Politics against Domination (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 4.
49
Michael Walzer strongly insists on this characteristic hope of social critique: “Perhaps there is one
common mark of the critical enterprise. It is founded on hope: it cannot be carried on without some sense
of historical possibility. Criticism is oriented toward the future: the critic must believe that the conduct
of his fellows can conform more closely to a moral standard than it now does or that their self-
understanding can be greater than it is now or that their institutions can be more justly organized than
they are now.” Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in
the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 17; see also Michael Walzer, Interpretation and
Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
50
See recently Jeremy Waldron, Political Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2016).
51
Brian Barry, “Why Political Science Needs Political Theory,” Scandinavian Political Studies 25: 2
(2002): 107–115.
of the inquiry are the conditions of appearance of problems and solutions.52 On the
other hand, problematization is a deliberate activity that aims to question what
institutions have rendered banal—that is to say, to render problematic that which is
taken for granted.53 On one hand, then, problematization is critique in the strict sense:
it brings to light the unthought of practices that have deleterious consequences for
human activity; on another side it is deconstructive, it interrogates the very fact that a
practice or institution has become familiar and accepted. In both cases, it becomes
possible to denounce a routinization and normalization that has become invisible to the
actors upon or among whom this practice operates.

Ethical Function
Finally, there is a fourth function of political theory, one that is generally neglected: its
ethical function. It concerns not only those who do political theory but also those who
read it, and, again, in this respect political theory is as one with the human sciences.
The will to understand the world (heuristic function), to judge it (pedagogical function),
and to propose improvements to it (critical function) flow from an existential ambition
to change one’s life. As Wittgenstein tells us: “just improve yourself; that is the only
thing you can do to better the world.”54 Leaving aside the individualist cynicism of this
proposition, a continuity can be grasped between the ethical aim (the examined life)
and the political aim, which Paul Ricoeur sums up as follows: “the good life with and
for the other in just institutions.”55 Three conclusions can be drawn from this.
Firstly, the raison d’être of the political theorist must be an existential concern for the
res publica—that is to say, a firm belief in the continuity between the individual and
society on one hand, and between ideas and actions on the other. Let us call this the
passion or vocation of the political theorist—one cannot dedicate oneself to a vocation
so arduous (given the current state of French academia) without a certain act of faith.
Ideas and values have importance, they play a part in the way in which power is
distributed, and they therefore deserve to be studied, taught, criticized, and defended.
We consider that certain ideas can help us in fighting domination, or that certain
practices place certain values in peril,56 and we must recognize that theories can give
responses, correct errors, imagine solutions. The relativity of these theories, the

52
Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 383–385; “The Concern for Truth,” trans. Alan Sheridan,
in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed.
Lawrence D. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1990), 255–270. On the transformation of brute facts into
data as the scientific activity par excellence, see John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the
Relation of Knowledge and Action in The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 4: 1929 (Carbondale-
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 99sq.
53
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” [1984], in The Foucault Reader, 32–50.
54
Cited in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), 213.
55
Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: Chicago University
Press, 1992).
56
Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” The American Political Science Review 63, no. 4
(December 1969): 1080.
precariousness of the responses, the persistence of errors or the abstraction of solutions
cannot be allowed to deplete the energy deployed by every intellectual enterprise that
has politics as its object. The best rallying cry is Schumpeter’s: “To realize the relative
validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes
a civilized man from a barbarian.”57 Whether theory is normative, interpretative, or
genealogical, it exposes the limits of our thinking, and therefore pushes us to think
better and do better, in conditions of pluralism and conflictuality.
In addition, the political object by definition makes us sensitive to relations of power.
And so the theorist has an emancipatory vocation by virtue of the very fact of his
making them explicit. If intellectual curiosity is an everyday resource that motivates
one to read, write, or teach, the responsibility mentioned above consists in rendering us
all more conscious of the way in which power functions, and tends toward domination.
A realist political theorist is guided at the very least by a certain Spinozism: knowledge
is freedom. It is in understanding better and better what affects us and what determines
us that we can live a life more free. If it does not make us wiser, political theory
contributes towards making the world more “livable” by posing the question perfectly
stated by Leca: “What should the world be in order for us to be able to live in it
‘humanely’”?58
Finally, here we rediscover Rawls’s ambition for reconciliation: political theory
channels sad passions by politicizing them. As Éric Weil states, “without theory, there
is only affective malaise and violent revolt, both indeterminate and unexplained, that is
to say impossible to soothe or to overcome.”59 Theory does not appease conflict by
wagering on a consensus to come, but it does summon us to rationalize it. By virtue of
this, the need for analytical clarity in political theory is not a sign of the imperialism of
Anglo-American philosophy, but rather a kind of democratization: argumentation
requires a clarity in its statements so that everyone concerned by these statements can
understand them.60 When we call theory “political,” then, we are not simply designating
its object, but also its “public” in the pragmatist sense of the term. The determination
of problems, the elaboration of the ends sought, and the clarification of values, are
activities that have consequences beyond the inner circle of theorists: they play a direct
part in the constitution of a public. Because true philosophers are those who occupy
themselves with the problems of men and women (and not the problems of
philosophers),61 they have an active part to play and a responsibility in the construction

57
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976),
235.
58
Leca, “La théorie politique,” 157–158. See also Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability,
Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 280: “Humanity is under a
collective obligation to find ways of living and cooperating together so that all human beings have decent
lives.”
59
Éric Weil, “Philosophie politique, théorie politique,” Revue française de science politique 11, no. 2
(1961): 290.
60
Waldron, “What Plato Would Allow,” 148.
61
According to Dewey’s slogan: “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing
with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with
the problems of men.” John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in The Political Writings,
of our political experiences. To be subject to domination is first of all a concrete
experience; but to understand what it is, what it has produced, and the concept of non-
domination that it calls for, is to transform that experience into knowledge, to discover
relations between this experience and other experiences (inequality, injustice, etc.) or
between my experience and that of others, and to produce possibilities of exit from the
problematic situation.62 As Dewey writes:
[W]ithout resistance from surroundings [. . .] the self [would not] become aware
of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither
disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates
irritation and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and
solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation.63
Theoretical work enables us to lessen the “irritation and rage” we feel when faced with
an environment that is hostile or that resists our ambitions—not by making us accept
it, but by giving us the opportunity to interact with it.

Conclusion
Epistemological and methodological introspections are bound to remain case-specific,
otherwise theorists would succumb to a sort of methodological textualism, with priority
given to what has been said of the problem rather than to the problem itself, to the
articles of colleagues rather than to the object of the inquiry. The possibility of political
theory being derailed and precipitated into a new scholasticism, as seen in various
schools that discuss the work of a master rather than the problems he or she addressed,
is grave and endemic. But the causes of this are not intrinsic to the discipline: as
everywhere, the injunction to publish is powerful, and the retreat of this particular
subdiscipline is a consequence of its institutional marginalization.
This has not been a plea to make political theory an autonomous discipline. We only
wished to indicate the particularly tragic situation for young theorists in France today,
and to present—no doubt in a rather too abstract manner—the functions of political
theory so as to justify its legitimacy within the human and social sciences, and in
particular in political science.
In attempting to sum up, it is first of all to be celebrated that Raisons Politiques has
never swerved from this task since its creation some fifteen years ago. Its primary
ambition of insisting both on the link between the theoretical and the empirical and on
the interest of studying and developing theoretical discourse is of a piece with the
pragmatist approach taken in this article. But it is also sad to observe that the situation
that interpellated the creators of this journal is the same one that worries us today:

eds. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), 8.
62
On this approach to knowledge as action, and the articulation of the ideal as “possible” (as opposed to
the idea as “actual”) see Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 235–240.
63
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee/Putnam, 1934), 59–60.
 The University—and all of its broader extensions—knows philosophy and the
social sciences, the circle of thought, of ideas and concepts, and that of the
domain, of the empirical and the concrete. But, as a matter of mistrust, of habit,
and of principle, it tends to place closed doors rather than bridges between the
two. It opposes or distinguishes when it should make connections and bring
together.64

64
Editorial, “Penser la politique,” Raisons Politiques 1 (2001) : 1.