Book Review: Is Political Philosophy Impossible? Thoughts and Behaviour in Normative Political Theory, by Jonathan Floyd

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719833634
• Author: Burke Hendrix
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Date: 01 February 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

126 Political Theory 48(1)

argument for authoritarianism, but it is not itself an argument from authority.)

But the deeper challenge concerns whether Frank’s view is internally stable.

For one thing, if the text really is polyvocal then it is not clear what licenses

Frank to make determinate claims regarding its position on mimēsis—but

these claims are necessary to ground the claim that the text is polyvocal. For

another, if Frank is right that Plato wanted to teach ordinary Athenians to

scrutinize claims to authority by creating texts full of “failures, inconsisten-

cies, and missed opportunities” (16), then it must be said that he was almost

comically naïve about the capabilities of his readers—after all, it seems to

have taken around two and a half millennia for somebody to finally get the

message. If Plato was astute enough to recognize, on the other hand, that

advanced hermeneutical skills would be rare in a society where only elites

received formal education, then the sheer complexity of the communicative

strategy that Frank attributes to him in this boldly transformative book

implies that he must have been writing for a limited audience of “those few

people who are born with the best natures and receive the best education”

(431c). It seems impossible to have it both ways.

Is Political Philosophy Impossible? Thoughts and Behaviour in Normative Political Theory,

by Jonathan Floyd. Cambridge University Press, 2017, 278 pp.

Reviewed by: Burke Hendrix, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591719833634

Is normative political theory possible for intellectually limited creatures such

as ourselves? Answering this question requires thinking carefully about what

the term “political theory” entails and about the resources available for the

project that this term demarcates. In his new book, Jonathan Floyd sets out to

provide a definition of political theory that focuses on its ambitions to intel-

lectual persuasiveness and seeks to show why political theory, understood in

what he calls a “mentalist” way, cannot possibly succeed given its methods of

proceeding. Floyd argues instead for a more behaviourally centered vision of

normative analysis.

Floyd’s book sets out to answer—or, perhaps better, to consider how one

might answer—three interlinked questions. These are the Organising

Question (OQ), the Foundational Question (FQ), and the Guiding Question

(GQ) (6–7, 37). The Organising Question is: How should we live? Because

this question does not give enough guidance about the kinds of reasons that