Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy

Anthony Downs’s Economic Theory of Democracy has been marginalized in normative democratic theory, notwithstanding its prominence in positive political theory. For normative theorists, the “paradox of voting” testifies to the reality of moral motivation in politics, a species of motivation foreign to Downs’s theory and central to the ideals of deliberative democracy that normative theorists developed in the 1980s and 1990s. The deliberative ideal displaced aggregative conceptions of democracy such as Downs’s model. The ensuing segmentation of normative democratic theories that assume moral motives (like deliberative democracy) and positive models of democracy that assume selfish motives (like Downs’s theory) leaves both without the resources to diagnose the persistence of ideological partisanship and polarization that beset modern democracies. Engaging Downs’s theoretical contributions, especially the median voter theorem, would constitute a salutary step toward a democratic theory that integrates normative and positive theory.

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is arguably the twentieth century’s most influential work of political philosophy after Rawls’s Theory of Justice. It substantially responds to Rawls, despite ranging over many topics. The Experience Machine, discussed in Part I, engagingly articulates Nozick’s discomfort with utilitarianism, and with Rawls’s way of modeling separate personhood. That is, Rawls depicts bargainers as separate consumers, entitled to separate shares, while dismissing the separateness of what they do as arbitrary. Part II continues to pound on the incongruousness of respecting our separateness as consumers (see his discussions of distributing grades and mates) while implicitly denigrating and even denying our separateness as producers. Part III argues that true utopia would not impose a favored vision of utopia while silencing incompatible rivals. It would instead be a cooperative society for mutual advantage, premised on everyone coming to the table with a robust right to say no to unattractive offers.

Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct

This chapter surveys some of the main themes of Michael Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct (1975). Despite Oakeshott’s reputation as a conservative thinker, an examination of his theory of civil association reveals how extensively the book anticipated subsequent developments in contemporary liberal political philosophy. On Human Conduct offers many insights into questions of liberal neutrality, civility, agonistic pluralism, and radical individuality that have come to dominate the writings of leading contemporary exponents of liberalism. Notwithstanding these enduring influences, however, the book proves much less helpful in clarifying thorny questions about the distribution of membership in bounded political communities.

Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations

Charles Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations (PTIR) played a pioneering role for contemporary international political theory by bringing together two domains of inquiry that had proceeded largely independently from each other in the twentieth century. This chapter will assess PTIR’s contributions to international political theory and explore its continuing relevance for debates on sovereignty, human rights, and globalization in a plural world. After reviewing the ways in which PTIR shaped the evolution of both international relations theory and political theory by questioning the central assumptions of international anarchy and political autonomy and by establishing cosmopolitanism as the dominant mode of analysis for international political theory with its groundbreaking argument for a global difference principle, the chapter will conclude by identifying several productive tensions in Beitz’s work that can further enrich contemporary discussions of global justice.

James Scott, Seeing Like a State

States see the world in a particular way, simplifying their domains to better rule them. By the early twentieth century, these ordering imperatives coincided with progressive ideals grounded in hopes that scientific and technological progress could shape the world for good. That conceit—that we should use the formidable power of the state to forge grand rational schemes for human improvement—blinded planners to the critical importance of local, cumulative, practical knowledge. This is Scott’s core thesis in Seeing Like a State, which he supports with a rich (if selective) body of evidence. If we defend Scott’s book as political theory, then we might worry that he has simply rediscovered skeptical themes (specifically, worries about coercive power and rational planning) long-evident in counter-enlightenment, anarchist, libertarian, and postcolonial thought. These worries, while reasonable, should not obscure the great value of Scott’s book as grounded political theory: there are lessons here, both methodological and substantive, for political theory.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Published in 1975, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish has profoundly affected how we think about power and hierarchy broadly speaking, as well as their specific effects on incarceration. If the text initially influenced debates on moral autonomy, political agency, and historicist methodologies for political theorizing, its influence has since widened. The following article (1) briefly presents the argument in Discipline and Punish, and its implications for rethinking power and hierarchy; (2) considers its reception in light of debates around agency, autonomy, and political activity; and (3) finishes by tracing Discipline’s implications for work on subjectivity and subject-formation, incarceration and poverty governance, feminist theory and intersectionality, and inquiry into colonialism and its legacies.

Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices

Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices is often oversimplified, and its radicalism underplayed. Far from simply endorsing “putting cruelty first,” the work doubts that this is politically desirable (or even clearly possible). Its defense of hypocrisy is subtler and more ambivalent than often thought. Its attack on aristocratic, “primary” snobbery merits less attention than its defense of a pluralistic snobbery that allows each of us to find some group that may freely exclude, and look down on, (some) others. Its skepticism regarding accusations of betrayal relies less on direct political analysis than on a moral-psychological analysis of our need to attribute disloyalty to others. Its defense of the “liberalism of fear” stipulates the limits of such a liberalism and the necessity to join it with representative democracy. Finally, Shklar’s benign misanthropy leads her not only to endorse constitutional politics but also, and more fundamentally, to denigrate systematic political theory.

Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family

Susan Okin’s radical thesis in Justice, Gender, and the Family is that the ideal of the gender-structured family is source of persistent gender inequality in politics, the workplace, and actual families. However, the book has widely been taken to be making a much narrower claim: that theorists of justice should extend their analysis to the family, ensuring that the division of labor in the family is just. As a result of this misreading, feminist theorists dismissed the book as conventional when it was published, whereas political theorists largely viewed it as innovative. This chapter recenters the radical thesis of the book, shows how Okin’s most important critics have misunderstood it, and discusses why now perhaps more than even in 1989, we should revisit this book.

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment

In The Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock shows how Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentine political thinkers adapted Aristotelian and Polybian insights to create a paradigm of republican political thought that was sensitive to the problem of stabilizing civic virtue against inevitable political decay in time. This republican paradigm, he famously insists, traveled to eighteenth-century Anglo-American contexts via the work of James Harrington and helped political thinkers make sense of two seemingly disparate events—the rise of finance in Britain and the American Revolution—in civic republican terms. Pocock’s insistence that The Machiavellian Moment is a work of history does not negate its contributions to political theory. First, it is a significant text for political theorists who attend to the role of language and discourse in political thinking, although the Pocockian approach bears limitations worth acknowledging. Second, Pocock’s work is critical to the republican revival in contemporary political theory, because he centers and defends Florentine and Anglo-American republicanisms as political discourses worthy of scholarly attention. Lastly, The Machiavellian Moment appears, in hindsight, as a foundational text for scholarship in the history of political economy, particularly the pre-history of finance and credit.

Jon Elster, Sour Grapes

This chapter evaluates Jon Elster’s Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality thirty-five years after publication. In the first section of the chapter, Elster’s work is put in intellectual context. The chapter draws attention to the significance of Elster’s framework in changing our understanding and scope of rational choice theory. It argues that the focus on adaptive preferences has opened up important questions for any political theory and policy science confronting the relationship between experts and the agents theorized. In the second section of the chapter Elster’s aesthetics and his critical treatment of Foucault is re-evaluated and found to be less compelling. In particular, Elster’s critique of a certain kind of consequence explanation is criticized.