Resurgence of political theory. (2019, 2026, 10 Marks)
In 1956 Peter Laslett announced that for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead. Within fifteen years it was the most vigorous field in the discipline. The resurgence was not a return to the history of ideas but the rebirth of normative argument — made rigorous, engaged and, later, plural.
What had caused the decline
Dante Germino, in Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory (1967), blamed two forces. Positivism recognised only verifiable facts, reducing claims about the good life to preference. Ideology, with Marxism its fullest system, did the reverse: it treated contested first principles as settled doctrine, closed to inquiry. Between a science that would not judge and creeds that would not question, reflective theory lost its standing.
Why it revived
- Philosophical: Isaiah Berlin, in “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” (1962), argued that theory dies only if every political question becomes empirical. Values such as liberty and equality genuinely conflict, and no quantity of facts settles them. Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) then showed that even natural science rests on interpretive paradigms, weakening the positivist ban on values.
- Political: civil rights, Vietnam and student revolt exposed a value-free science with nothing to say. David Easton‘s “New Revolution in Political Science” (1969) conceded as much.
- Post-behavioural: the Credo of Relevance readmitted values, clearing institutional space for normative work.
- The classical tradition held its ground: even at the behavioural peak, Leo Strauss (What Is Political Philosophy?, 1959), Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958), Michael Oakeshott (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) and Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1952) kept the perennial questions alive. Germino’s remedy was to identify political theory with political philosophy — neither reductionist behavioural science nor dogmatic ideology, since it pairs knowledge of political facts with critical judgement about their meaning and whether first principles hold.
Markers of the revival
| Marker | What it restored |
|---|---|
| John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) | Systematic theory of distributive justice through the original position |
| Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) | Libertarian rights and the minimal state |
| Communitarians — Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), Michael Sandel (1982), Michael Walzer (1983), Charles Taylor | The embedded self against the “unencumbered” liberal self |
| Jürgen Habermas | Communicative rationality; deliberative democracy |
| Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (1995); Bhikhu Parekh | Group-differentiated rights, multiculturalism |
| Thomas Pogge, Martha Nussbaum | Global justice and capabilities beyond the nation-state |
The field widened to identity, gender (Susan Moller Okin) and the planet.
Indian and contemporary anchor
Amartya Sen‘s The Idea of Justice (2009) contrasts niti (just institutions, Rawls’s focus) with nyaya (realised lives), shifting theory from ideal design to comparative removal of injustice. The Supreme Court’s seven-judge ruling in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024), permitting sub-classification of Scheduled Castes, turns on exactly the revived questions — is the bearer of justice the individual or the group, and what does substantive equality require? Rajeev Bhargava‘s “principled distance” account of secularism shows Indian material generating theory in its own right.
Limits
Raymond Geuss and other realists charge that Rawlsian ideal theory retreats from power and feasibility. Post-colonial scholars note that its canon stayed largely Western. Specialisation also risks recreating the academic isolation that Alfred Cobban lamented in 1953.
Conclusion
The resurgence was real because its cause was structural: facts cannot settle disagreements about ends. It restored both the normative task of justifying ends and the analytical task of clarifying concepts; neither positivism nor ideology could make the normative approach redundant. What returned was theory disciplined by evidence and pressed by public problems, from affirmative action to climate duties; its test now is relevance beyond the seminar room.