What is the nature of the crisis in political theory? Suggest remedies to overcome it. (1994)
A crisis in a discipline is a loss of confidence in what it is for. Political theory’s crisis was not a shortage of books but a breakdown in the link between theory and practice, which Karl Marx had already sharpened: the philosophers have only interpreted the world … the point is to change it. Each dimension of the crisis suggests its own remedy.
Nature of the crisis
- Crisis of relevance. Alfred Cobban (1953) found theory addressed to fellow academics rather than to citizens. David Easton‘s 1969 address admitted that scholars had perfected technique in ivory towers while civil rights and Vietnam went unaddressed.
- Crisis of method. Positivism’s fact-value dichotomy dismissed evaluative statements as preferences. Thomas Dewar Weldon’s The Vocabulary of Politics (1953) treated classic political philosophy as largely a confusion of language.
- Crisis of historicism. Theory became curatorship — commentary on Plato to Marx, with no new synthesis. Easton called it living parasitically on the past.
- Crisis of ideology. Either theory was dismissed as ideology in disguise, or the end-of-ideology thesis (Daniel Bell, 1960) declared the big questions closed. Herbert Marcuse retorted that a science copying natural science quietly endorses the status quo.
- The Indian form. Bhikhu Parekh, in “The Poverty of Indian Political Theory” (History of Political Thought, 1992), asked why a democracy of India’s intellectual richness had produced so little original theory. He cited reservations: the scholarship had not settled whether groups rather than individuals bear justice-based rights, or how justice trades off against efficiency. Borrowed liberal and Marxist categories and an empirical bias left Indian experience under-theorised.
Remedies
- Reunite fact and value. Normative argument must know its feasibility; empirical work must state its premises. John Rawls‘s reflective equilibrium disciplines principles by considered judgements. Amartya Sen‘s The Idea of Justice (2009) ranks real alternatives instead of designing a perfect society.
- Relevance without advocacy. Easton’s Credo of Relevance — substance must precede technique — is the right correction, provided that commitment does not replace evidence.
- History as method, not museum. Quentin Skinner‘s “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” (1969) reads texts as moves in real arguments, recovering rather than repeating the classics.
- Pluralise the canon. Comparative political theory treats Kautilya, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and B. R. Ambedkar’s case for social democracy as sources, not curiosities. Partha Chatterjee‘s concept of political society shows Indian material producing concepts that travel worldwide.
- Theorise live problems. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling allowing sub-classification of Scheduled Castes (State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh) poses exactly Parekh’s unanswered question — individual versus group as the unit of justice — as does climate burden-sharing.
- Interdisciplinarity. New institutionalism and deliberative democracy show theory and empirical research sharpening each other.
Conclusion
The crisis was one of nerve, not of subject matter: disagreement about ends never disappeared, only the confidence to reason about it. The remedy is not a new method but a restored vocation — theory that is rigorous about evidence, open to non-Western sources, and willing to take a position on the problems its society actually faces.