The Socratic Turn. Dustin Sebell

1970, 590) of his on the new political science called forth the not unexpected objection that it presupposed “an almost occult sense of the mysteries of politics, the magic of insight and sensitivity, the alchemy of special, unarticulated wisdom” (591; compare Wolin 1969, 1071, 1074), Wolin’s response was contemptuous and dismissive (1970, 592; but cf. Schaar and Wolin 1963, 146). He denied, in effect, that a political theorist needed to address the question with the “high degree of precision” that Dahl, for one, demanded (1958, 95–98).

      Due in large part to its unwillingness or inability to meet the demand that it become “scientific,” political theory was for a time deemed by its friends and foes alike to be “dead” or, at a minimum, in “decline” or “decay.”¹ That passed, of course. Among other things, to be brief, unwelcome practical consequences of the behavioralists’ “scientific study of politics”—the irrelevance of the latter to “the immediate issues of the day” (Easton 1969, 1055; Parenti 2006, 502–3), not least the war in Vietnam—combined with powerful critiques of positivism and its theoretical basis, the fact/value distinction, gave political theory a new lease on life (Ball 1995, 45–53). But the fall of behavioralism, an event that seemed to make room again for traditional political theory, was a peculiar thing; it was in a way, as one of the foremost historians of the discipline puts it, a “non-event” (Ricci 1984, 211; cf. Freeman 1991, 33). For the only clearly recognizable feature of the largely indefinable “behavioralist persuasion” was its “scientific outlook,” which is to say, its claim that political science can and, what is more, should model itself after modern natural science (Ricci 134–36; Dahl 1961; Cobban 1953, 334). And this claim was never seriously questioned, much less abandoned (209–11).² It has in fact endured to this day (23).³ It is no wonder, therefore, that history seems to be repeating itself.

      Political theory once again finds itself on the brink,⁴ and it has been driven there in large part by more or less the same objection that led to its first near-death experience. “From the heyday of the behavioral revolution to the present, political scientists have objected that political theorists are not ‘scientific’” (Ball 2007, 1, 5). Not long ago, for example, King, Keohane, and Verba could express the demand—which, they pointed out, is usually met by the “quantitative-systematic-generalizing” branch of social science and usually unmet by its “qualitative-humanistic-discursive” (1994, 4) branch—that the methods of genuinely scientific research be “explicit, codified, and public” by appealing to a statement made by Robert K. Merton some fifty years earlier (8). “The sociological analysis of qualitative data,” Merton said, “often resides in a private world of penetrating but unfathomable insights and ineffable understandings. … [However,] science … is public, not private” ([1948] 1968, 71–72). The vitality this objection has shown over the years is equaled by the vitality of political theory’s “go-to” defense against it. For example, in response to the fact that, today, too, “in the eyes of its critics, research in political theory resembles humanities research far more closely than it does scientific research” (2002, 578), Ruth Grant more recently set out to “articulate some of the common presuppositions, generally unspoken, that guide the ways in which research in political theory is done” (577). As impressive as her articulation of these presuppositions undoubtedly was (cf., e.g., 587–89), however, it did not meet the issue as political theory’s critics see it. “To political scientists, the perpetual disagreements among political theorists and the repeated reconsiderations of the same issues and texts are indications that political theorists lack meaningful standards for assessing what constitutes good research” (577). Yet, like Wolin, instead of making the case that political theorists can in fact appeal to such standards, she all but acknowledges that, even or precisely on their own presuppositions, they cannot do so. Certain “epistemological realities,” she says, leave the humanities—and political theory, it is conceded, belongs to the humanities (578)—exposed to persistent “uncertainties and disagreements” (581). And, insofar as “messy uncertainties and disagreements” cannot be removed from political phenomena (591–92), political theorists cannot be expected to spell out “in rather careful language” (Dahl 1958, 97) the means of their removal.⁵

      In short, “the discipline is stuck in a time warp” (Parenti 2006, 506) and many of those who have been in the profession for decades feel “a profound sense of déjà vu” (Hawkesworth 2006, 153; Behnegar 1997, 98–99; Schram 2012, 20–21).⁶ “Empirical” political scientists continue to demand of their “normative” colleagues something the latter continue to insist, in turn, cannot or should not be done (Rehfield 2010, 466; Freeman 1991, 31). Whether the former have an adequate grasp of their own demand, which would include an adequate grasp of what scientific knowledge is or should be, is not certain. However that may be, it is obvious that, whereas they for their part claim to proceed scientifically, their “normative” colleagues are generally unwilling or unable to claim as much for themselves (Brown 2010, 681). And this of course puts them in an awkward situation. For political theorists can hardly sacrifice the intellect or relinquish the mantle of science completely. In doing so, they would have to face the consequence that, just as their critics have been saying all along, “having a subfield of political philosophy in a department of political science is akin to having a subfield of faith healers in a medical school” (Kasza 2010, 699). It therefore comes as no surprise that political theorists tend to blur the issue. To return to the exemplary case at hand, immediately after asserting that “uncertainties and disagreements” can never be removed from the matters with which political theory is concerned, Grant adds, “nonetheless, those things can be understood in some sense; reasonable judgments about them are possible” (2002, 582, 584). But again, no attempt is made to articulate the evidence or criteria on the basis of which “reasonable” judgments could be sharply and exactly distinguished from unreasonable ones. And so it would not be altogether reasonable, given what she says here at least, to take Grant’s word for it that political theory can be reasonable (cf. White 2004, 10).⁷ Apologies for political theory too often boil down in this way to the recommendation that we must beware of throwing out the baby (“reasonable judgments”) with the bathwater (“false, vague, unreliable, or even ‘mystical’” ones). Recommendations to this effect tend to presuppose, however, without so much as trying to prove, that the baby is sharply and exactly distinguishable from—despite admittedly having “a family resemblance” to—the bathwater. On the other hand, if political theorists cannot relinquish the mantle of science completely, why not dispense with such half measures and simply lay claim to it themselves? That is to say, why not reject the separation of (political) science from (political) philosophy as an error once and for all?

      This course, though it may be the only consistent one, is liable to be written off immediately by “normative” political theorists, to say nothing of their “empirical” colleagues.⁸ Traditional political philosophy, as Ronald Beiner broadly defines it, consists in “super-ambitious reflection on the human condition, on ‘the ends of life’” (2014, xxix) with a view to capturing the truth about “the normative foundations of human experience” (230, cf. xxvi). Simply put, it is the attempt to convert, by way of “critical examination,” our opinions about just or good things into knowledge of just or good things (cf. M. Sandel 2009, 27–30). However, the possibility of a successful attempt along these lines—the possibility, that is, of a genuine science of the matters with which political philosophy is concerned—is all but inconceivable today. Two almost insuperable, mutually reinforcing obstacles are especially responsible for this.⁹

      In the first place, there is the difficulty that opinions about just or good things are, now as ever, controversial.¹⁰ And criteria on the basis of which mere opinion could be reasonably distinguished from knowledge are not clearly available (Berlin 1962, 4; Bookman 1970, 22–23; Pennock 1951, 1083). The oft-maligned “vagueness” of much political theory is due to this longstanding lack. But the modern distinction between “facts,” which are knowable, and “values,” which are not—a distinction which, now that it has been somewhat discredited, still lives on subterraneously even in the work of political scientists who no longer invoke it in broad daylight:¹¹ for example, in the guise of the distinction between “empirical” and “philosophic” or “normative”¹²—is not warranted by this age-old situation.