Professing Political Theory

• Author: John G. Gunnell
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912910367497
• Published date: 01 September 2010
• Date: 01 September 2010
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium

Political Research Quarterly

63(3) 674 –679

© 2010 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912910367497

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Professing Political Theory

John G. Gunnell1

Abstract

Political theorists cannot reasonably maintain an institutional attachment to the discipline of political science and claim

a place in the curriculum of the field while professing intellectual autonomy. Political theory is the progeny of American

political science, as well as a subfield of the discipline, and it is important to dispel mythologies of political theory as a

separate world-historical endeavor. Political theorists, like all social scientists, must realistically come to grips with their

cognitive and practical relationship to their subject matter and resist the forms of dislocated rhetoric that sustain their

often anomalous condition.

Keywords

political theory, political science, profession, politics, moralism, scientism

My view of both the history and contemporary condition

of academic political theory in the United States coin-

cides very closely with that presented by Timothy

Kaufman-Osborn in “Political Theory as Profession and

as Subfield,” and in several respects, my comments are

intended as an annotation of his article. This is not to sug-

gest, however, that the implications that I draw from his

analysis necessarily coincide with his assessment of

the proper role for political theory. While many political

scientists and political theorists are quite content with the

growing distance between political theory and political

science, my argument is unequivocally for integration

or at least greater complementarity (Gunnell 2006).

Although this might seem to ally me with the spirit of the

Foundations of Political Theory letter to the Department

of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University,

I have serious reservations about both the content and

purpose of that letter.

Timothy’s account of the dilemma of political theory

indicates that part of the difficulty in addressing issues

revolving around the “profession” of political theory arises

from a paradox. While political theory is a highly pluralis-

tic field and tends to lack even the limited sense of identity

that adheres to other subfields of political science, it often

seeks to claim a distinct intellectual character as a basis

for establishing its independence from the discipline

of political science to which it remains institutionally

attached. This has led, as Timothy suggests, to the evolu-

tion of an imagined community of political theory. To

understand this situation, there is a need to recognize and

reconcile two quite different senses of “profession”1 that

have been entangled in this discourse. The genealogy of

political theory as an occupation and form of professional

academic employment has, from the beginning, been

surrounded with a mythology of political theory as a

world-historical calling devoted to the public profession

of faith, belief, and opinion.

Although during the past half century the mythology

of political theory has often been designed to vouchsafe

its autonomy as an interdisciplinary, humanistically ori-

ented practice, which can be distinguished from the sci-

entific pretensions of mainstream political science, its

various contemporary varieties are the progeny of politi-

cal science. This subfield originated in the mid-nineteenth

century, within the emerging discipline of political sci-

ence, as an elaborate historico-philosophical narrative of

the development of Western political thought. This narra-

tive served to provide an ancestry and provenance both

for American democratic political institutions and for the

discipline of political science and its Teutonic theory of

the state. In this story, it was not only political theory that

took on a transcendental status but politics itself, which

was conceived as substantially more universal, profound,

and noble than its putative manifestations in conventional

political practices. This narrative functioned, within the

academy, to distinguish political science from other fields

of social science, but it also was intended to validate the

cognitive authority of the discipline with respect to its

right and capacity to profess about matters of civic educa-

tion and public policy. This search for authority was the

beginning of a long history of offering an epistemological

answer to the practical problem of the relationship

between political theory and politics.

1University of California, Davis, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

John G. Gunnell, 3052 Prado Lane, Davis, CA 95618

Email: jggunnell@ucdavis.edu