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Political Theory and the Study of Politics: A Report of a Conference*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Harry Eckstein
Harry Eckstein
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The issues which arose during the discussions of the conference fall fairly conveniently into three compartments.

First, we obviously had to settle, with reasonable clarity, what we were talking about: what “political philosophy” is, what “political science” is, and whether they are really distinguishable. The basic issue of the conference was to determine the relevance of the one to the study of the other, and if we had decided that they were really the same thing, there would simply have been no problems for us to discuss. On the whole, we felt that a valid, if not necessarily sharp, distinction was to be made between the “philosophical” and the “scientific” approaches to the study of politics and that we were not discussing absurd or tautological issues. We agreed, however, that all types of political inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and that the title “political theory” has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1956 , pp. 475 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1956

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Footnotes

*

Reprints of this article may be obtained on request to the Curriculum Development Project, Political Science Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

References

1 Miss Iles (in T. L. Peacock's Gryll Grange): “The poor young men … are not held qualified for a profession unless they have overloaded their understanding with things of no use in it ….”

The Rev. Dr. Opimian: “Very true. Brindly would not have passed as a canal-maker, nor Edward Williams as a bridge-builder. I saw the other day some examination papers which would have infallibly excluded Marlboiough from the army and Nelson from the navy …. Fancy Watt being asked how much Joan of Naples got for Avignon when she sold it to Pope Clement the Sixth.”

Compare, on the other hand, the remark of Mr. Flosky (in Nightmare Abbey), who speaks for the “wisdom” party (Flosky is a parody on Coleridge, a political philospher in good standing): “My dear Miss O'Carroll, it would have given me great pleasure to have said anything that would have given you pleasure; but if any person living could make report of having obtained any information on any subject from Ferdinando Flosky, my transcendental reputation would be ruined forever.”

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