Why Did They Assume Only Humans Had Politics?

• Author: Kennan Ferguson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128888
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128888

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 74 –85

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128888

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Article

Why Did They Assume

Only Humans Had

Politics?

Kennan Ferguson1

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.

Given that political science has proven to be the most robust, intellectually

capacious, and predictive of academic disciplines, outpacing physics in 2066

and technobiology in 2070, the Committee for Conceptual Critique has been

tasked with analyzing the successes and limitations along the way. Our major

foci concern not only what we have learned, but what it took surprisingly

long to recognize. Thus this specific Committee Report addresses one central

question asked by most beings beginning to study the history of political

thought: why, for most of the discipline’s history, did political scientists

assume that politics was strictly and solely limited to humans?

1Department of Political Science, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kennan Ferguson, Department of Political Science, Bolton Hall, University of Wisconsin –

Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA.

Email: kennan@uwm.edu

1128888PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128888Political TheoryFerguson

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