Political Theory: How and Why?

You may not be interested in political theory; but political theory is interested in you.

Why?

People sometimes ask: What is the point of political theory? Why struggle with these abstract theories of politics, economics, and ethics? Aren't people driven more by their vested interests than by abstract ideas? So if we want to improve things, shouldn't we focus on changing institutions and incentives, rather than on wrestling with abstract theories? What's in it for us?

A partial answer is:

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil."

--John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)

And here are some other illuminating answers to these questions.

How?

Another question that laypeople frequently ask is: How does one do political theory? The question might be put like this. "How does one do this sort of thing? I skim a work of political philosophy, and I see a lot of theories of this or that; or of arguing from these premises to that conclusion, of distinguishing this doctrine from that, of defining different terms; of analyzing different concepts, of objecting to this or that thesis, of describing clashing values, of criticizing an ideology, of running thought experiments, of presenting counter-examples, of deriving principles, of arguing for rival criteria, of justifying the state, of setting the proper scope and limits to this or that institution, of appealing to intuitions, and even of proving lemmas and then theorems, from axioms and postulates! I can read this and feel that I roughly understand it, but how does one learn to do it oneself?"

To this, teachers and practitioners of the subject often reply, "You learn it by doing it!" Many theorists agree with J. O. Urmson that, "Philosophical method can be taught as well, or better, by example as by precept."* This view is true, and important. There is no royal road to skill in theorizing. But the questioner would still like some precepts. After all, nobody becomes competent at any endeavor without having some precepts about it. So the questioner wants an account of the tools and techniques one can use to do political philosophy, and of the sorts of problems on which political philosophy uses them. A good way to proceed would be to look up, in a philosophical encyclopedia, discussions of the tools just mentioned--arguments, distinctions, definitions, etc. And also to look up discussions of the main problems of political philosophy That would give her a collective account of those tools and the problems they are used on. She could then look at how those tools are used, and how some of those problems are posed, in a great work of political philosophy, like Machiavelli's Prince or Hobbes's Leviathan.

But a shorter and more concrete account would be useful. Let's begin with the tools of political theory, and then turn to its problems.

Tools and Techniques of Political Theory

We might consider eight tools as fundamental to political thought: theories, distinctions, category-applications, criteria and definitions, critique, the search for presuppositions, justifications, and arguments. (1) Theories are crucial because they systematize, sort, and order our ideas and beliefs, and philosophy is centrally concerned with such systematization. But exactly how theories do this systematizing, and how to learn and use theories, are complex questions, with which we deal below. (2) Distinctions are essential because one thing political theory wants to know is whether apparently similar things are really different. It needs to do this because it seeks to tell us what is better than what, or what is more right and what more wrong. Was, for example, Italian Fascism the same ideology as Nazism? If not, what distinguishes them? (3) Category-application too is central, because political theory wants to know whether a category applies to some particular thing universally, sometimes-but-not-always, or never. For example, take war as the thing and acceptable action as the category: political theory would like to know whether making war is never an acceptable action, sometimes-but-not-always an acceptable action, or always an acceptable action. But, to decide such a question, you need (4) criteria and definitions. For to decide whether war is always, sometimes, or never acceptable, you need a definition of war and a criterion for counting as an acceptable action--as well as a grasp of which values war-making seems to undermine. (5) Another crucial tool is criticism--the criticism of institutions, policies, actions, ideologies, principles, rights and duties, and theories. In criticizing, we evaluate: we set out what we think are the values, truths, and principles that should control the object of criticism, and then see to what extent the object respects them. So, for example, Jeremy Bentham in his youth applied himself to the criticism of English common law and its principles. The two principles that he proposed for controlling common law were his greatest happiness principle, and his doctrine that laws should be explicitly stated rules. Using these two doctrines, he scrutinized the common law of his day, and found it a chaotic mess that satisfied neither doctrine. (6) But to be fair to the object of our critique, we must find out what that object presupposes: what are the beliefs or doctrines, however tacit, upon which it in fact rests? So, for example, Bentham in his critique of the common law tried to show that the common lawyers made the following presupposition. They presuppose, he argued, that legal rules of common law are those rules that are implicit in common-law judicial decisions, and that those rules are to be discovered and understood by applying knowledge of custom and common reason to discover the implicit principles which make the various decisions coherent. Take another example. In his paper, "Socialism and Weltanschauung," downloadable below, Charles Taylor asks what is the philosophical basis of modern, post-Enlightenment socialism. In other words, he seeks modern socialism's philosophical presuppositions. In answer, Taylor argues that all the varieties of modern socialism are based on three doctrines. First, Enlightenment modernization: that we can and should make societies in which people are maximally free agents, capable of choosing their own ends and effectively pursuing them. Second, expressivism: the idea that human life is and should be a three-way expression: of every individual's own person and character and values; of nature, with which humans can and should commune, and with which their own lives, when true to their expressions, can be in tune; and of human communion, with which each individual, when true to her own expression, can be in tune. Third, the doctrine that these two views need to be combined and reconciled. All modern socialisms, Taylor claims, rest on all three views, though some stress one of the three more than the other two. (7) Central to political philosophy are justifications of policies, institutions, principles, or rights and duties. For one of political philosophy's tasks is to show to what extent and under what circumstances we should support a policy or institution, accept a principle, or enforce a claimed right or duty. This is the task of justification. But how to perform justifications is a difficult question, with which we deal below. (8) Finally, arguments are crucial because political theory seeks to rationally support its main conclusions. If the political philosopher's goal is to show that women either are or are not unjustly subordinated, she owes us articulate and well-ordered reasons for whichever of the two conclusions she reaches.

Problems of Political Theory, and How to Find the Interesting Ones

All this puts us in a good position to think about the problems of political theory. For we could say that those consist in how best to apply those eight tools to the objects that political theory studies: injustice, states, authority, legitimacy, revolution, power, liberty, race, rights, the legal system, markets, international law, oppression, authoritarianism, ideologies like conservatism or liberalism or socialism, and on and on. For example, if we take the ideology of conservatism as our object, political philosophy might pose at least the following problems about it: What is the best definition of conservatism? What does conservatism presuppose? What if anything could justify accepting conservatism? Does conservatism live up to the values or principles that it should respect? Is conservatism a species of a broader genus of ideologies of the political right? If so, what is the genus? And so forth. Any of those are problems in which some political philosophers take an interest. So, if you are a beginning student of political theory, they would be good problems to think through and work on.

However, when you think through these problems and formulate a solution to them, remember that there usually are alternative solutions out there already, and that your solution should be aware of them. One further skill of political theory is posing interesting problems, and this requires your formulation of the problem to be alive to rival solutions. But how do you become aware of the rival solutions and their method of dealing with the problem? Here is one way. Following it will help you better pose your problems.

When we think theoretically, a lot of the interesting problems can be formulated as concerning how to resolve clashes among compelling values, or among attractive but seemingly incompatible theories, or among attractive but seemingly incompatible doctrines. One of the main goals of theorizing is to resolve these tensions: we try to justly balance among these values, or to justifiably accept or reject or reinterpret these theories or doctrines, so that our beliefs and our values are consistent and coherent. If we think carefully about these clashes of values or attractive theories or compelling doctrines, we often find that they can be understood as conflicts among three statements. Each of these three statements taken separately seems independently true or highly plausible, yet taken together, they seem incompatible--they can't all be true. One of the most famous of these conflicts is the problem of evil in Christian theology. It can be expressed as a conflict among three statements, each of which believing Christians find highly plausible.

(1) There is a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good.

(2) There is evil in the world.

(3) An all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good being cannot coexist with evil in the world; the being would never permit it.

For many Christians, each of these three statements seems compelling. And yet it seems that they cannot all be true. What then should we think about them? The philosopher Leibniz's famous solution was to argue that we should retain (1) and (2) but reject (3): this is in fact the best of all possible worlds, he argued--a better one without evil is not possible. Atheists, by contrast, frequently argue that we should retain (2) and (3) but reject (1): we should, they argue, deny that God exists. Some philosophers have even argued that the statement we should reject is (2): evil, they argue, does not really exist. It is an illusion. And some have argued that we can interpret each of the three statements in a way that makes them all compatible; if we attribute the right meaning to them, they argue, we can see that all three statements are true and compatible.

Most of philosophy's famous problems can be put this way. Take, for instance, the mind-body problem, put as three mutually inconsistent but independently attractive statements:

1. Human beings have consciousness; consciousness is something that really exists.

2. Everything that exists is ultimately composed of physical objects.

3. Consciousness isn't composed of physical objects.

Here it seems that any two of the statements is incompatible with the third. So what to do? Dualists like Descartes hold that we should reject (2):--they argue that there are some non-physical objects, conscious minds being one such object. Some materialists or physicalists argue that it is (3) that has to go: consciousness, they say, is real but ultimately physical. And some other materialists or physicalists say that it is (1) that causes the trouble: they say that consciousness is an illusion in a physical world.

Another example is the free-will problem. It too can be expressed as a clash among three independently attractive statements that together seem incompatible:

1. Human beings have free will: when we act, at least some of our actions are caused by our free choices--we could have done otherwise than we did.

2. Every event has a cause, which is another event.

3. If every event has a cause, then human beings cannot have free will.

Again, if you accept any two of those three, they seem to require you to reject the third. What to do? Some thinkers say that it is (1) that has to go. Thomas Hobbes famously argued that there is no such thing as free will--freedom is a social or political relation among people, but our wills are never free of necessity, because everything we do is caused by prior events. Other thinkers say that it is (2) that has to go. Aristotle arguably held that some human actions are caused by the human will, which is not itself an event. And David Hume famously argued that it is (3) that has to go. We could have done otherwise so long as it is true that had we had different desires, we would have acted differently. And this is consistent, Hume argued, with saying that all actual events are necessarily caused by other events.

The game, then, is to resolve the clash in each of these sets of three statements: philosophers call them "inconsistent triads." Most interesting philosophical problems can be formulated this way, and one advantage of doing so is that it makes it easy to guess what the alternative solutions will attempt. Notice, too, that resolving these clashes requires the thinker to defend a theory of why we should reject one of the statements, or why we should reinterpret them so that they are consistent. In doing so, the thinker will be reworking our understandings of our concepts and commitments, trying to interpret them in a way that makes them consistent and at the same time does justice to the phenomena. To rework them this way, we might say, is just what theorizing is. So to present an inconsistent triad is to invite people to theorizing. In doing so, we pose an interesting theoretical problem.

Let's take a pair of problems from political theory broadly conceived. One famous problem concerns the status of hard cases in the law. Hard cases are legal disputes where no settled legal rule seems to resolve the dispute. None of the settled legal rules in the legal system seems to clearly resolve the dispute. From this, many people suggest that the following three statements seem highly plausible:

1. In law, there are hard cases: ones where no settled legal rule resolves the case.

2. If there is no settled legal rule resolving a case, then there is no right legal answer to that case.

3. There are no gaps in the law: there is always a right legal answer to every legal case (even if nobody now knows what it is).

(2) is plausible because we tend to think that right legal answers require appeal to a settled legal rule. (3) is plausible because the law is supposed to be a consistent system of norms that we can always use to guide our behavior on any question. The law is supposed to be complete and consistent, so that we can always find out what we are legally empowered to do and what we are legally prohibited from doing. So we have another inconsistent triad. How should we deal with it?

The legal positivist H. L. A. Hart famously argued that it is (3) that has to go. There are, Hart argued, gaps in the law in every legal system. In every legal system, there will be legal questions to which there is no right legal answer: for those questions, judges have to create law to fill in the gaps. But their answer is not legally right (nor legally wrong), because there was no right answer before they decided the case. Hart argued that this solution was a theorem of legal positivism, a particular theory of the nature of law. The solution of course implies that the law does not give us any guidance on some important questions of behavior. Against this solution, the legal theorist Ronald Dworkin famously argued that it is (2) that is false. There is always a right answer to every legal question, Dworkin argued, because the right answer to any legal question is the one offered by the best interpretation of the relevant legal rules, of the principles underlying the law, and of the purpose of the legal system. And there is always such a best interpretation available, even if nobody agrees what it is. So the clash is caused by our false belief that only a settled legal rule can give a right answer to a legal question. Dworkin's solution has an unpleasant consequence: coming up with the right answer to any legal question requires a close-to-wholesale interpretation of the law as a whole, a rather Herculean task. As you can see, then, both theories offer illuminating solutions to the inconsistent triad, and both solutions come at a price. It is partly because the solutions set such a price that the problem is interesting.

Consider now our second example of an interesting problem of political philosophy. This we take from the philosophy of war. A deep-rooted view about war is that if a soldier in a war kills an enemy soldier on the battlefield, then so long as the killer did not kill in a way that broke the laws of armed conflict, she did not commit the equivalent of murder. In fact, she should not be accused of any legal wrong. It does not matter whether she fights for a just cause or a flagrantly unjust cause. If she kills in war while following the laws of war, then she does no legal wrong. But if she breaks those laws while doing that killing, then even if her side's cause is unimpeachably just, she has done something both legally and morally wrong.

We might well say that such wartime killing looks a lot like murder. Yet it seems a stretch to say that it is just as morally wrong as murder. Conversely, suppose that the tables had been turned, and the killed soldier had killed his killer. Here, too, many firmly believe that then the killer would not have done anything legally equivalent to murder, so long as his way of killing her did not break the laws of war. It does not matter if his cause was flagrantly unjust or the best cause in the world; whatever its justice, he has the same rights and duties under the rules of war as does she. So there is a widely and deeply held view about the ethics of war which says that all combatants in a war should be treated as morally equal, without regard to the justice or abhorrence of the cause for which they fight. All soldiers have the same rights and duties concerning who they may kill, how they may kill, and what they may do to their enemies.

This principle is often called "the moral equality of combatants." Many people think it is a fundamental and irreducible principle of the ethics of war. So we have the first statement of an inconsistent triad:

(1) All combatants in a war have the same rights and duties concerning killing, who they may and may not kill, and what they may do on the battlefield. These rights and duties are the same regardless of the justice of the cause for which they fight. This is a fundamental and irreducible principle of the ethics of war.

The second statement in our triad arises when we reflect on the idea of just cause. We tend to think that in any war, at least one party must not have just cause. This is because contemporary thinking about war holds that the only just causes for war are attempts to repel unjust aggression or to stop mass atrocities. But this means that if one party is repelling unjust aggression or stopping mass atrocities, then another must be committing unjust aggression or mass atrocities. Yet if they refuse to stop the aggression or the atrocities, and instead accept war with their opponent, then their cause for war seems to be that they want to continue the aggression or atrocities. In which case, they are fighting in an unjust cause. So it seems that if one party does have just cause for war, then at least one other party does not. Moreover, we tend to think that there can be wars in which at least one party does have just cause. Even if many or most wars are ones in which no party has just cause, there could be wars in which one party genuinely aimed at stopping a mass atrocity. And that seems a fairly just cause. Hence we have our second statement:

(2) In any war, at least one party must lack just cause for war. Yet there can be wars in which at least one party has just cause.

Our final statement arises when we reflect on what could justify the right to kill in war. When we think about killing other people against their will, it seems that it could only be right if it were done for a very good reason. Self-defense against imminent terrible harm, defending others against such harm--it seems that only reasons like these could justify killing a person against their will. Without such reasons, we have no right to kill, and others have no duty to refrain from punishing us for killing. And yet what is a good reason for killing other than just cause for killing? It seems, then, that we should say that only those who kill with just cause have a right to kill that the law should respect, and only they are protected by duties on us not to punish them for killing. All those who kill without just cause have no right to kill, and we have no duty not to punish them for killing. Yet if this applies to everyone in general, why not to combatants as well? What's so special about war that combatants should be able to kill without a good reason? Isn't what really matters in war the killing and wounding, and who is this done by if not individuals? But if it is individuals who ultimately do the killing and the wounding in war, then why should there be a special set of rules governing when individuals can kill and wound in war, one different than the ordinary rules governing killing and wounding? This gives us our third statement.

(3) Whenever anyone resorts to deadly violence, she must have a just cause for doing so, and this cause must be either self-defense against imminent terrible harm or defending others against such harm. If she does have such a cause, then she has the right to kill those who would inflict such harm on her or others. Moreover, all others have a duty not to punish her for the killing. If she does not have just cause, then she had no right to kill, and others have no duty not to punish her for the killing.

So we seem to have another inconsistent triad, generated by compelling and plausible rationales for each of the three statements. What to do? This is widely considered the central problem of the present-day political philosophy of war. One school of thought, the classical Just War Theory led by Michael Walzer, holds that we should reject (3). There is, they argue, something special about war such that the ethics of killing in war are fundamentally different than the ethics of killing in other circumstances. A combatant doesn't need just cause to have a right to kill enemy combatants, and to be legally protected in doing so. Another school, pacifism, says that the trouble is (2). We should not think, says pacifism, that wars can have a party with just cause for war. For there is no such thing as just cause for war. A third school, political realism, agrees with pacifism that it is (2) that has to go. Yet it rejects it for reasons different than pacifism. In any war, argues political realism, all parties have equally just cause. This is because causes for war are not the sort of thing to which judgments of justice and injustice can properly be applied. War is simply a matter of prudence and power, not of justice. A fourth school, revisionist Just War Theory, led by Jeff McMahan, says that (1) is the statement we should reject. When it comes to the fundamental principles of the ethics of war, says this school, we should reject the moral equality of combatants. The fundamental ethical principles of war should say that only those fighting in a just cause should have the protections offered to all combatants by the current laws of war. Those fighting without just cause should not, as a matter of the fundamental ethics of war, have those protections. For all just wars are ultimately composed of individuals fighting for good reasons--defending themselves against deadly force, or defending others against the same. The revisionists concede that we may want the laws of war to still provide equal protections to all combatants. But that is a concession to the probable harms that would occur if we tried to legislate the moral inequality of combatants. The moral equality of combatants is a temporary concession to facts on the ground. It is not, say the revisionists, a principled answer to the question, "What is the fundamental principle governing what combatants may do in war?"

Each of these theories offers a solution to the clash among the triad's statements. Each comes at a conceptual and moral cost, and each requires some profound reworking of widespread concepts and commitments. Thus the triad invites people to philosophize.

So far, our examples of inconsistent triads have been drawn from pure ethical or normative problems. But we can also use the triad-structure to formulate some of the more empirical and descriptive problems of economic or legal theory. Take, for example, the famous question of the nature of the corporation. This gets going when we reflect on the relation between a corporation's managers and its employees. On the one hand, it looks like a corporation is like a mini-government. The managers have the authority to order employees around, and the law treats the corporation as a single legal entity which can sue or be sued as a unit, which offers its investors limited liability for the corporation's debts, and which lives on after any of its members dies. Moreover, the corporation gets these legal powers through a charter issued by the state. On the other hand, it seems that membership or investorship in corporations is purely contractual. Nobody joins a corporation, nor invests in one, unless it is by her own free and express consent--an explicit contract. If a manager orders an employee around, or fires an employee, then so long as she has a contractual right to do this, she is just performing on the corporation's contract with the employee. Conversely, employees can quit, or they can refuse orders that are outside the terms of their contract with the corporation. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to investors. So it seems that corporations are in a sense explicitly contractual associations. But we tend to think that in an institution where all relations are explicitly contractual, those relations can't be the authority relations of a government. For the authority of governments cannot rest on explicit individual contracts among the government and each individual subject of that government. Hence we get the following triad:

1. Corporations are mini-governments, in that they have governing authority over their members.

2. Membership and investorship in corporations is explicitly contractual: all the relations among members, investors, and the corporation are controlled by the express contracts among the members, the investors, and the corporation. So all corporate relations are primarily contractual.

3. An association where all relations are explicitly contractual can't have the authority relations of a government.

Here again, we have three independently attractive statements. Yet they seem to be mutually incompatible. What to do? In response to this problem, one school of thought says that it is (1) that is false. This school defends the nexus-of-contracts theory of corporations, which holds that corporations are purely associations of explicit contract and are not mini-governments. The relation between a manager and an employee is like that between a consumer and a grocer. If the consumer doesn't like the grocer's product, she can go to another grocer, thereby "firing" the first grocer. Managers and employees, says this theory, have the same sort of explicitly contractual relation. So corporations do not have government-style authority over their members. Another school says that it is (2) that has to go. This school, the political theory of the corporation defended by Ralph Nader, Robert Dahl, Christopher MacMahon, and David Ciepley, sees corporations as mini-governments or even agencies of the state. Corporations, according to this theory, gain their authority over their members by the state's conceding to them authority over their members. This concession is performed through the corporate charter and through the laws controlling and empowering corporations. But this means, according to the theory, that membership relations in the corporation are not primarily contractual. They are authority relations. (Ask any corporate worker who has worried about being fired.) Finally, the transaction-cost approach to corporate governance, made famous by Oliver Williamson and Ronald Coase, argues that it is (3) that has to go. On this approach, corporate-employee relations are explicitly contractual, but the content of the contract is to give the corporation governing authority over the employee, so long as both parties are willing to continue the contract. So here again, we see that each of these solutions to the triad's clash of statements invites us to rework our concepts and commitments, and so to theorize.

Those are some examples of inconsistent triads. Such triads can be used to test whether a philosophical or theoretical problem is interesting, and they keep our own solutions to the problem alive to the existence of other solutions. If you can formulate a theoretical problem as such a triad, ask yourself whether each of the three statements seems attractive. Then think through what the likely solutions to the triad are--reject (1), (2), or (3)? re-interpret the statements so that they are compatible? Then ask yourself how illuminating those solutions are--how much insight do we get from those solutions, and the theories offered to justify them? If each of the three statements seems attractive, and several of the likely solutions seems theoretically illuminating, then the odds are that you have posed an interesting philosophical problem. Moreover, you are in a position to offer a solution to that problem, one that is alive to the merits of rival solutions.

How to Use Theories, How to Perform Justifications

We have said that two questions deserve more discussion. (1) What theories do, and how to learn and use them, and (2) how to perform justifications of policies, institutions, principles, or rights and duties.

* J. O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Two World Wars (1958), p. 183.