Twenty-First-Century Political Theory: A Balance

• Author: Humberto Beck
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221127662
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221127662

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 18 –26

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221127662

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Article

Twenty-First-Century

Political Theory:

A Balance

Humberto Beck1

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory.

The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a

retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were

asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century

and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be

making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they

vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent

concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people

decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the

political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms

might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published

in response to these queries.

How to make sense of the social and political history of the last one hundred

years and its impact on the evolution of political thought during the twenty-first

century? This essay focuses on the key trends, works, and movements that

illustrate how political thinkers of the previous century have tried to make

sense of their circumstances. The analysis reaches our immediate past, the first

decades of the twenty-second century, offering an incursion into the history of

the present.

1El Colegio de México, Mexico City, Mexico

Corresponding Author:

Humberto Beck, Centro de Estudios Internacionales, El Colegio de México, Carretera Picacho

Ajusco 20, Col. Ampliación Fuentes del Pedregal, Tlalpan, 14110, Mexico City, Mexico.

Email: hbeck@colmex.mx

1127662PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221127662Political TheoryBeck

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