Explain the Philosophical approach to the study of Political theory. (2025, 10 Marks)
The philosophical approach is the oldest way of studying politics; the discipline began as a branch of philosophy. It asks what the state is for and what it ought to be, reasoning from premises about human nature to standards for judging real institutions. Also called the normative approach, it judges how politics works against moral standards and proposes improvement. Leo Strauss (What Is Political Philosophy?, 1959) called it the attempt truly to know both the nature of political things and the good political order.
The logic behind it
- Knowledge of ideas: for Socrates, real knowledge is of universal definitions, reached through dialectic. Plato turned these into permanent ideas in the Republic: grasp the idea of the state (justice) and imperfect states can be moved towards it.
- Ideal tempered by practice: Aristotle grounded the normative aim in his school’s survey of some 158 constitutions and sought the best attainable state: a mixed polity anchored in the middle class.
- Deduction from human nature: Aristotle’s political animal or Thomas Hobbes‘s fearful, self-preserving individual (Leviathan, 1651) yields the art of government and the grounds of political obligation. From obligation flow rights, liberty, equality, justice and democracy.
How it works
- Clarifying concepts: Vernon Van Dyke (Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis, 1960) treated philosophical analysis as clarifying thought about a subject and the ends and means of studying it. What do sovereignty, authority or liberty mean?
- Setting standards of right and wrong for evaluating laws, institutions and policies.
- Thought experiments: John Rawls‘s original position behind a veil of ignorance (A Theory of Justice, 1971) asks which principles people would choose not knowing their own place in society. He sought principles any free and equal person could accept, though Political Liberalism (1993) confined them to constitutional democracies.
Philosophical versus empirical
| Empirical | Philosophical | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | What is the case; how do institutions operate? | Are they just, legitimate, desirable? |
| Method | Observation, measurement, testing | Conceptual analysis, argument, thought experiment |
| Output | Explanation and prediction | Standards for critique and proposals for reform |
David Hume‘s gap between is and ought (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–40) explains the division: facts alone yield no verdict. A practice may be popular yet unjust, so normative critique may stand even against the data.
An Indian illustration
Amartya Sen‘s The Idea of Justice (2009) contrasts niti (organisational and behavioural propriety) with nyaya (justice as realised in people’s lives). He rejects the search for a perfectly just order in favour of comparative judgements that remove manifest injustice. The argument proceeds from concepts, not counting, yet it tells policy what to measure.
Criticisms
- Unverifiable: behaviouralists dismissed “armchair theories”; James Bryce wanted facts.
- Subjective: T. D. Weldon (The Vocabulary of Politics, 1953) reduced value claims to taste.
- Utopian: Karl R. Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945) read Plato’s ideal state as a charter for a closed society.
- Culture-bound: post-colonial critics see Western “universals” as provincial.
- Hard to apply: realists such as Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss argue that ideal principles abstract from power and feasibility, guiding little in real politics.
The reply is that politics is full of normative claims, and refusing to examine them leaves them unexamined. No count of slaves refutes Aristotle’s defence of slavery.
Conclusion
The philosophical approach is indispensable but not self-sufficient. It supplies the ends and concepts that empirical science presupposes but cannot produce, and from Plato to Rawls and Sen its lasting value is that it keeps open the question of what a good polity is — questioning the settled, challenging the status quo and proposing better political lives.