“… political theory is not an escape mechanism but an arduous calling.” (John Plamenatz) (2014, 10 Marks)
John Plamenatz (1912–1975), the Montenegrin-born Oxford theorist who succeeded Isaiah Berlin as Chichele Professor, advanced this view as a defender of the discipline when Peter Laslett (1956) and Robert A. Dahl (1958) were pronouncing it dead. His essay “The Use of Political Theory” (Political Studies, 1960) and Man and Society (1963) insisted that systematic reflection on political values remained both possible and necessary.
The phrase answers a mid-century charge. Logical positivists and behaviouralists treated traditional theory as an escape: a flight into abstraction and unverifiable value talk, remote from how politics actually works, to be replaced by empirical, value-neutral science. Plamenatz turns the charge around.
“Escape mechanism”: what theory is not
Plamenatz’s target is theory as refuge from the discomfort of political judgement. The escape takes three forms:
- Antiquarian escape: retreating into the history of ideas, cataloguing what Thomas Hobbes or Karl Marx said without asking whether they were right.
- Scientistic escape: retreating into fact-gathering without theory — what David Easton called hyperfactualism — to avoid the question of ends.
- Utopian or ideological escape: building consoling blueprints or partisan doctrines immune to criticism.
“Arduous calling”: what theory demands
- Conceptual rigour: clarifying contested concepts — justice, liberty, authority, consent, obligation, democracy — on which Plamenatz’s own Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation (1938) worked.
- Engaging the classics as arguments: Man and Society reads Niccolò Machiavelli to Marx as live claims to be tested, not museum pieces.
- A practical philosophy: people in changing societies need a coherent account of the ends of government, and supplying it is hard intellectual labour.
- A civic duty: theory asks what institutions are for and whether they serve those ends. Without it a polity drifts into moral blindness and lets technical efficiency set policy; with it, citizens can name abuses of power, argue for reform and defend democratic norms.
The word “calling” echoes Max Weber‘s idea of a vocation; Sheldon S. Wolin‘s “Political Theory as a Vocation” (1969) made the same case against method-driven political science.
Vindication from both sides
- Leo Strauss, in his “Epilogue” to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1962), said the value-free science fiddles while Rome burns, unaware of either the fiddling or the fire; the true escape, on this view, was scientism.
- Easton, who had built the behavioural creed, conceded the point in 1969: his credo of relevance made relevance and action the discipline’s watchwords.
Critiques
- Contextualist: Quentin Skinner (1969) attacked this style of reading classic texts as anachronistic — asking John Locke questions he was not answering.
- Positivist: Thomas Dewar Weldon held such theorising to be confusion of language; the rigour Plamenatz claims is, on this view, rigour about nothing verifiable.
- Realist: Raymond Geuss argues that much ideal theory in the line of John Rawls is itself an escape — from power, conflict and feasibility — turning Plamenatz’s charge against the revival he anticipated.
Indian illustration
B. R. Ambedkar‘s final Constituent Assembly speech (25 November 1949) exemplifies the calling: he warned that India was entering a life of contradictions — equality in politics, inequality in social and economic life — and demanded that the contradiction be resolved. That is theory as unflinching diagnosis, not consolation.
Conclusion
Plamenatz is right, and the history since has vindicated him: the revival after Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) was precisely theory accepting the burden of judgement. But the charge cuts every way — antiquarianism, scientism and ideal theory can each become an escape. The calling is arduous because it must refuse all three.