The Marginalization of Political Philosophy and Its Effects on the Rest of the Discipline

• Author: Gregory J. Kasza
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912910370693
• Published date: 01 September 2010
• Date: 01 September 2010
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium

Political Research Quarterly

63(3) 697 –701

© 2010 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912910370693

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The Marginalization of Political

Philosophy and Its Effects on

the Rest of the Discipline

Gregory J. Kasza1

Abstract

Political philosophy has a unique role to play in political science. It focuses attention on the big ontological, epistemological,

and normative questions that constitute the foundation of the scholarly enterprise. Due to the reification of subfield

boundaries, the assault from hard science, the inward-looking perspective of many political philosophers, and political

wrangles within political philosophy, it has ceased to play its distinctive role very well in recent years. As illustrated

by the recent debate over methodology, the result is that the rest of the discipline has lost political philosophy’s vital

contribution to our common intellectual life.

Keywords

graduate education, philosophy of science, professionalization, methodology, positivism, academic politics

As a scholar of comparative politics, I am flattered by

Timothy Kaufman-Osborn’s invitation to participate in this

symposium. The fate of political philosophy as a subfield

does not affect my career directly, nor can I comment on

the ways in which the subfield’s evolving identity may

have shaped or distorted the research of its members.

I contemplate its waning importance in political science

as a concerned neighbor, however, and I am troubled by

the impact of the subfield’s decline on the rest of the

discipline.

Without giving the matter the attention it deserves,

I will state my own understanding of political philosophy

(old-fashioned, no doubt, compared to the understand-

ings of the other contributors) so as to render what fol-

lows comprehensible. Political philosophy is an enterprise

characterized by the questions it asks, which are the big

questions concerning the nature of politics, knowledge,

and morality. What is the character of the human being

and human society? What is politics and what should

be the proper scope and objectives of political research?

What sort of knowledge about politics is possible? What

is science? What is a good society? Most adherents of

the many schools of thought that Kaufman-Osborn (this

issue) lists in his essay are asking these big questions

in one form or another. I read or reread works of political

philosophy most often when I sense that my research has

become focused on minutiae and requires refocusing on

issues that truly matter.

Political philosophy should not be equated with a

canon of great works, since that would identify it with

a finite set of answers rather than a set of questions.

But the scholars exploring the big questions did not become

an identifiable or self-conscious group only in response to

the onslaught of modern science. They may have acquired

a novel institutional identity in recent decades, but for

over two thousand years scholars of political philosophy

have recognized each other as being engaged in the same

endeavor and have reacted to each other’s arguments,

much as Kaufman-Osborn’s own research has reacted to

Dewey, Marx, and other political philosophers that pre-

date him.

The basic ontological, epistemological, and normative

questions of political philosophy constitute the foundation

of scholarly research. The answers to them will always

remain contested, but it would be a mediocre scholar who

never grappled with them. Political philosophy should be

the starting point of every political scholar’s education,

engaging researchers across the entire spectrum of politi-

cal studies. Some thirty-five to forty years ago, it did that,

1Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Gregory J. Kasza, Department of Political Science

and Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures,

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA

Email: kasza@indiana.edu