Vision and Exemplarity: Political Thinking Between History and Theory

Abstract

This article is concerned with the relationship between political theory, history, and methodology. It cautions against a further ‘methodologization’ of political theory. The article argues against what recently has been called the ‘methodological militancy’ within political theory, which on methodological grounds seeks to keep history and theory strictly apart from each other. Instead, the article argues that political thinking ought to combine untimely resources with timely concerns into a distinct political practice entailing both history, theory and politics. Moreover, the article contends that thinking politically from the outset of historical examples has not only been the modus operandi of most classical political thinkers, but that historical examples are particularly well-suited as raw materials for political thinking. Finally, the article argues that vision and imagination – rather than objectivity and detachment – are the defining intellectual capacities of the political thinker.

Keywords:

• Methodology of political theory
• historical examples
• exemplary thinking
• Sheldon Wolin
• Hannah Arendt

There is an incongruity in having a Methodenstreit at the center of political theory. It indicates that substance is being replaced by procedure and that the idea of the political has become blurred and meaningless.¹

Introduction

Political theory’s relation to the discipline of political science is and has been somewhat ambiguous and troublesome. Since the behavioral revolution of the 1960s, political science as a discipline has grown suspicious of history, philosophy, and theory and has increasingly adopted a scientific ideal modeled on the natural sciences. Today, methods and insights on human nature and behavior taken from economics, evolutionary psychology, and biology arguably guide political scientists more than the zoon politikon of old. The conflict between political theory’s normativity and the supposedly ‘value-free’ reasoning of empirical political science has been at the center of the quarrel since the 1960s, as empirical political scientists have criticized political theorists for their lack of methodological rigor, and as political theorists have accused empirical political scientists of not explicitly recognizing their foundational normative commitments to liberal democracy and market economy. For a discipline that was partly founded to analyze the political systems of the ‘free world’ vis-à-vis its totalitarian counterparts, political science displayed a surprisingly shallow understanding of democracy, some political theorists argued.² This conviction was most vividly stated by Leo Strauss who famously argued that “one may say (of the new political science) that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”³ The worry expressed by Strauss, and shared by political theorists at the time, was that political science was ill-equipped to confront the horrors of totalitarianism as well as understanding and appreciating the values and principles of democracy because of its expulsion of values and politics and its embrace of a positivist philosophy of science. As argued by Benjamin Barber, many political theorists “shared the belief that positing value neutrality in the face of totalitarianism’s ongoing challenge to liberal society was foolish, mischievous, and perhaps even suicidal.”⁴

In a way, the figurative ‘Rome’ is burning once again. While the end of the Cold War left liberal democracy and market economy as the only game in town, in the last decades, authoritarian populists across Western democracies have harvested votes and gained access to the offices of government, while support for democratic institutions has decreased and the rule of strongmen (and women) has once again become attractive for many.⁵ While popular support for democratic institutions is failing, market economies are no longer guarantees of superior economic performance, meaning that instrumentalist justifications of liberal democracy no longer suffice.⁶ In this fast-changing political climate, a supposedly value-free political science needs the normative reasoning and historical awareness of political theory as a point of orientation. In order to explicate how political theory can function as such an orientation point, this paper discusses political theory’s relation to methodology, history, and politics. Although recent years have seen an increasing preoccupation with the methodology of political theory, expressed, for example, in the excellent anthologies by Leopold & Stears (2008) and Blau (2017), the paper cautions against an overtly instrumental use of methodology in the political theory, as it might entail the loss of the ability to think politically, as implied in the paper’s epigraph by Sheldon Wolin. The main ambition of the paper, hence, is to propose a mode of political thinking that combines untimely resources with timely concerns into a distinct practice entailing history, theory, and politics. While scholarly rigor, detailed textual interpretation, and in-depth knowledge of contemporary politics and society are indeed necessary to learn from the past, as Adrian Blau has recently argued,⁷ the mode of political theory developed in this paper is also to be judged by the inspiration it creates, by its ability to reorient and mobilize its readers,⁸ which cannot be settled solely by rigorous methodology.

To provide these arguments, the article is structured the following way: Firstly, as a way of developing the mode of political thinking central for the paper, I discuss political theory’s relation to the dimensions of ‘untimeliness’ and ‘timeliness.’ Secondly, I explore the relationship between political theory and methodology and cautions against the ‘methodologization’ of political theory. Thirdly, I turn to the relationship between history and theory, as it has been understood by various strains of political theory. I argue against what Jeffrey Edward Green has called ‘methodological militancy,’ implying a strict separation of history and theory. Fourthly, a sketch out what is entailed in an exemplary form of political thinking by drawing primarily on Machiavelli’s mode of theorizing as well as Arendt’s notion of exemplary validity. Fifthly and finally, I turn to Sheldon Wolin’s two different notions of vision in order to demonstrate the importance of the intellectual capacities of vision and imagination for the exemplary political thinker.

The Timely and the Untimely

In 2016, the journal Political Theory published a guide to its archive, which gathered prior articles from the journal under the title ‘Political Theory and the Untimely.’ The collected articles discuss political theory’s relation to actual politics, contemporary events, philosophy, and history. In the introduction to the volume, the editor Nicholas Tampio writes: “To be a political theorist is to negotiate the timely and the untimely.”⁹ As Tampio prosaically suggests, the political theorist must every morning decide whether to enter an untimely space and immense herself in a classic work of political thought or whether to occupy the space of timeliness and speak to the political issues of the day. The political theorist, furthermore, “must explain how dwelling in the untimely can shed light on contemporary political affairs.”¹⁰ Although a very brief description of the vocation of the political theorist, it expresses something important about how the practice of political theory can be understood, and – at least – how the political thinker differs from the historian and the political scientist. Whereas the historian and the political scientist primarily occupy either the untimely or the timely and insist that these domains can be held apart and kept distinct, the political theorist mediates between them, as her reflections occupy both. She can primarily say something about timely questions by drawing on untimely resources, and the primary reason for studying the tradition of political thought is to somehow speak to present affairs, if not to intervene directly in contemporary politics. The timely and untimely, the present and past, in other words, are intertwined and entangled. This does not mean, though, as Blau has recently argued,¹¹ that there are not more or less sound and rigorous ways to use the past for contemporary purposes. I return to this discussion later in the paper.

This means that political thinking, at least in this understanding, is situated in a triangle of different perspectives: history, theory, and politics. As such, the political thinker is not really a political scientist because he deliberately breaches the fact/value-distinction that a modern social science modeled on the natural sciences has come to adhere to.¹² Nor is the political thinker a historian because his preoccupation with history is not for the sake of the past itself; it is not concerned primarily with getting the facts about the past right, but instead with illuminating those facts that are of special importance to present concerns. Finally, although the political theorist is indeed some kind of a philosopher, he does not leave the cave (his political community) in order to think. Precisely because he philosophizes politically, philosophical virtues such as universality and detachment are often combined with political virtues of engagement and polemics. Take, for example, a look at the epilogue to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, where Hannah Arendt incorporated an optimistic reflection on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956:

The last chapter of the present edition is an Epilogue or an afterthought. I am not at all sure that I am right in my hopefulness, but I am convinced that it is as important to present all the inherent hopes of the present as to confront us ruthlessly with all its intrinsic despairs. In any event, to a political writer this must be more important than to present the reader with a wellrounded book.¹³

The Origins is indeed a grim book, disclosing the political and ideational roots of unprecedented state violence, and as Arendt acknowledges, the optimism of the epilogue on the Hungarian workers’ councils reads rather strange as a conclusion to the book. That Arendt is not sure whether she is right in her hopefulness – whether she reports truthfully on ‘what really happened’ during the Hungary Revolution, thus writing a well-rounded book – but that she is nonetheless convinced of the importance of this hopefulness as a political writer, shows how political thinking can combine (intellectual) history, theorizing and political engagement – that is, history, theory, and politics. The divide between thinking and acting, which is characteristic of much philosophy and science, is bridged by the political thinker because she is also a political actor who engages in her own time and recuperates the untimely past for the sake of the timely present. What makes thinking political, in the above quote by Arendt, is the bridging of past, present, and future into a reflection on the potentialities and pitfalls of the contemporary situation.

Building from these cursory introductory reflections, I caution in the section below against an overtly instrumental use of methodology in political theory. I argue that political questions, controversies, and differences ought to take precedence over methodological issues when doing political theory. Instead, I defend an understanding of political theory, which combines history and theory into a unified political reflection. In this understanding of political theory, historical examples are particularly well-suited as raw materials through which the political thinker theorizes, and vision and imagination are the key intellectual capacities of such a political thinker. In short, I regard political theory as a deeply polemical, normative, engaged, and contestatory practice rather than a rulebound, objective, detached, and withdrawn form of thinking.

The Price for the Methodologization of Political Theory

Recent years have seen a proliferation of discussions on the methodology of political theory.¹⁴ Different, competing paradigms of political theoretical explanation, which imply distinct and nuanced understandings of how political theoretical knowledge is gained and how conclusions are reached, have been developed and heavily debated.¹⁵ I will not go into the details of these competing methodological approaches. Instead, I will discuss political theory’s relation to methodology in general and caution against a further ‘methodologization’ of the discipline.

The discipline of social science, political science included, went through a process of ‘methodologization’ with the behavioral revolution of especially the American academy of the 1950s and 1960s. The ‘behavioral turn’ in political science dictated that the study of politics had to become scientific, which meant applying the critical rationalist program of Karl Popper, with its focus on developing testable and falsifiable hypotheses to the empirical domain of politics. Questions of the ideally best polity, the value of civic virtue, the meaning of the good life, or the normative foundations of democracy are not easily turned into such testable hypotheses, and hence, according to the judgment of the behavioralists, these questions should not be a part of political science. As Sheldon Wolin has noted, in this academic environment, “the possession of method is regarded as a mark of professionalism and, hence, of legitimacy.”¹⁶ As a result, methodological debates have started to occupy the minds of an increasing number of political theorists, who have developed a specialized and technical methodological language of their own. Quentin Skinner’s method of analyzing historical ideas through Austinian speech act theory, the formal logic of analytical philosophy, John Rawls’ method of reflective equilibrium, Jürgen Habermas’ rational reconstruction, and the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – just to name some examples – represent highly diverse and also highly technical methods within the field of political theory.¹⁷ As such methodological approaches are developed after the ‘scientification’ of the study of politics, one could get the impression that such methodological approaches were developed largely as a response to the craving for methodological rigor in the social sciences in general.

But the rise of methodology within political theory and political science is correlated, some claim, with the loss of something else. As Rogers Smith has argued, as methodological instruments grow more and more accurate, and their application more and more rule-based, the questions we are able to answer with such methods become less interesting and narrower.

It is probably impossible to achieve very rigorous empirical results in support of clear, logical theoretical propositions addressed to any but a small number of relatively minor political matters … but when we move to larger questions, as we should also do, our best science is inevitably ‘softer’ science.¹⁸

The stricter the criteria of validity, reliability, and generalizability become, then the ‘quality’ of the empirical data becomes more important than the questions we want to pose when we choose our research agendas. As already argued by the political theorist Walter Berns in the midst of the behavioral revolution, the result, then, “is the sacrifice of political relevance on the altar of methodology. The questions asked and pursued are determined by the limits of the scientific method rather than by the subject matter.”¹⁹

The narrower our understanding of ‘science’ becomes, the more limited our questioning will be. As Wolin argues, “the essence of methodism is constraint by rules or conventions … There is an incongruity in having a Methodenstreit at the center of political theory. It indicates that substance is being replaced by procedure and that the idea of the political has become blurred and meaningless.”²⁰

A methodological struggle in political theory indicates that the idea of the political has become blurred and meaningless – why? Because when methodological discussions become dominant to political thinkers, it means that there is less time to discuss political, normative questions – and more importantly, that over time, political thinkers will fail to learn what it is to discuss and think politically and normatively because they are predominantly preoccupied with questions of methodology. Take another example from Wolin: In his primary intervention in this debate – the famous article ‘Political Theory as Vocation’ (1969) – Wolin provided the following argument: The application of methodological rules and technics in political theory is undeniably new²¹. Edmund Burke and Tom Paine, for example, did not evaluate the French Revolution differently due to differences in method but due to differences in politics.²² The differences between understanding the revolution as a violation of deep-seated practices, a break with the divinely ordained principle of monarchy and an arrogant belief in the reason of man on the one hand (Burke’s position), or a leap forward in the universal rights of man and the emergence of popular sovereignty on the other hand (Paine’s position), rely on fundamental disagreements on the nature of human beings, the common good and politics – not on differences in method. As the Greek-French political thinker Cornelius Castoriadis also argues: “In the decades following 1789, or 1917, there was little ‘academic’ or ‘scientific’ writing about the French or the Russian Revolutions. There was, however, an extraordinary proliferation of political writing about them. People were writing in order to take sides – they were for or against.”²³

Glancing through the canon of the history of political thought shows that few political thinkers before the so-called ‘behavioral revolution’ advanced their concepts of politics, regime forms, and civic life through a set of strict methodological rules. It can be argued that ‘method’ is a contemporary stand-in for the idea of ‘truth,’ or at least for some kind of qualified certainty, which is supposed to be the hallmark of science. As such, by following a specific recipe, one’s claims about the world acquire the status of certainty or quasi-truth. If this is a correct assertion, political theory, and methodology, or politics and truth, could be said to have a fundamentally oppositional relationship. This is, for example, the position of Hannah Arendt. In her essay ‘Truth and Politics,’ she unfolds the age-old conflict between politics and truth, starting with the conflict between the Platonic philosopher and the polis. According to Arendt, truth has to do with the nature of things; it is, hence, everlasting, and its principles are meant to stabilize human action. There is even an element of coercion in truth – the same ‘constraint by rules’ of methodology that Wolin speaks of. As Maurizio Passerin d‘Entrèves has aptly argued: “Set against the plurality of opinions, truth has a despotic character: it compels universal assent, leaves the mind little freedom of movement, eliminates the diversity of views, and reduces the richness of human discourse.”²⁴ In politics, instead, according to Arendt, there can be no truth in singular, only opinions in plural.²⁵ For Arendt, this has to do with her understanding of politics and human action through the concepts of plurality and natality,²⁶ but for my endeavor, Arendt’s argument could be rephrased the following way: Political theory always involves a kernel of normativity – of axiomatic opinion – and hence disagreements in political theory cannot primarily be adjudicated through instruments of method. As Arendt says, “that all men are created equal is not self-evident nor can it be proved,”²⁷ no method will provide certainty on the question of the best polity, the just distribution of goods, or the desirable amount of popular participation in politics. “These are matters of opinion and not of truth,” Arendt contends, and “their validity depends open free agreement and consent … by means of persuasion and dissuasion.”²⁸ Now, these arguments concerning the conflict between politics and truth and the caution against a further ‘methodologization’ of political theory are not meant to glorify the realm of politics or to elevate political theory to an ivory tower, where any attempt to concretize the endeavor equals the loss of political thinking as an ephemeral, ungraspable activity. There are indeed good forms as well as bad forms of political theory. Recently, Blau has outlined various common pitfalls when attempting to draw contemporary lessons from the history of political thought, including the lack of novelty in the proposed argument, the tendency to overgeneralize the shortcomings of contemporary research literatures, and a lack of appreciation of the complexity of contemporary issues.²⁹ But while Blau focuses on “the logic of inferences – on how best to draw robust conclusions”³⁰ in political theory, I argue that good and bad political theory cannot only be solely distinguished by the right or wrong application of method. Furthermore, my argument is that the increasing focus on methodology damages the political theorist’s ability to mediate between the untimely and the timely – that is, to insert himself in the triangle of history, theory, and politics.

In another famous intervention in this debate on political theory and methodology, Jeffrey C. Isaac – in the article ‘The Strange Silence of Political Theory’ (1995) – argued that political theorists “have become puzzle solvers of the problems of others, focusing on approved topics, following academic conventions.”³¹ Isaac’s reason for this harsh conclusion was the lack of engagement by political theorists – at the time the article was published in 1995 – with the Eastern European revolutions of 1989. According to Isaac, the lack of engagement with events of such enormous importance is, among other things, due to the scientific ‘normalization,’ in the Kuhnian sense, of political theory in the age of post-behavioralism and the rise of what Wolin calls ‘methodism.’ The model of ‘normal science’ that Thomas Kuhn developed as a way to understand how the normal production of scientific knowledge functions provides, first and foremost, a stable research environment, which establishes the limited questions and controversies that members of such research environment can partake in without delegitimizing the foundations of the scientific paradigm, hence deepening the specialized knowledge on the questions that the scientific paradigm allows its members to ask.³² But as Kuhn himself acknowledged, “perhaps the most striking feature of the normal research problems … is how little they aim to produce major novelties … the range of anticipated, and thus assimilable results, is always small compared with the range that imagination can conceive.”³³ As such, one of the consequences of such a ‘normalization’ of political theory through its ‘methdologization’ is that the perspectives of history, theory, and politics, the combination of which I take to be absolutely central to political thinking, have come apart and that the mixing of such forms of knowledge is cautioned by many on the grounds of methodology.

Methodological Militancy: Political Theory as Either Philosophy or History

As already mentioned, I take the integration of history and theory for some – although vaguely defined – political purpose as the core of political thinking. By saying this, I have not really said a lot. Because what is the relationship between history and theory? Or, more concretely, what is the status of a political theory that draws extensively on history to develop its principles? How do political thinkers draw on history in order to advance theoretical and political agendas?

Before I turn to these questions in the following sections, as well as to the concepts of vision and exemplarity, which I take to be central for political thinking, I review what Jeffrey Edward Green has recently called the ‘methodological militancy’ within political theory, that is, the understanding in recent methodological debates in political theory and intellectual history that history, theory, and politics are to be kept apart.³⁴ In these debates, it is commonplace to argue that history and theory, or history and philosophy, ought not to be entangled, but studied separately. One version of this position comes from philosophy, which Green labels “the philosopher’s critique of political theory.”³⁵ Some political philosophers argue that the study of the past ought to have no special relevance for the reflection on normative questions such as the nature of justice or the meaning of freedom. The central task, such a philosopher argues, is to advance an argument by the force of rationality, logic, and formal argumentation. To dive into the archives of history is to let oneself be confused with the failed arguments, dead ends, and logical fallacies of past minds. Such a philosopher’s critique of historically oriented political theory can primarily be associated with so-called analytical philosophy.³⁶ Construed very broadly, such a form of political philosophy advances its arguments through formal logic and argumentative exactness.³⁷ As two sympathetic observers of this mode of political philosophy argue, ‘analytical political philosophy’ “refers to an argument-based, issue-oriented, rather than thinkerbased and exegetical approach that emphasizes logical rigor, terminological precision, and clear exposition.”³⁸ Hence, (analytical) philosophy is about the pursuit of truth in the form of good arguments, and the study of the history of philosophy or textual exegesis of past texts is a somewhat futile endeavor. Gilbert Harman, a leading analytical philosopher, expressed this position at its extreme, as he argued

that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to the students of philosophy. Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.³⁹

Whereas history, in this understanding, registers different kinds of facts, philosophical argumentation is cumulative, as it leads its students closer to certainty, and, as such, the errors of yesterday have no special role to play in this pursuit. An argument concerned with the principles of a just society need not start with the different ways justice have been understood historically, how prior attempts to develop just principles shape how the subject can be discussed today, and so on, but can start tabula rasa with the question itself. This description of analytical political philosophy is obviously also a construct, insofar as its most famous contemporary practitioner – John Rawls – developed his theory of justice in direct conversation with a utilitarian tradition encompassing David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham.⁴⁰ Not even Rawls, hence, develops his theory in a context-less space of pure issue-oriented argumentation. Analytical political philosophers would agree with the argument that political theory is to develop principles, but they would disagree with the argument that historical events and actual politics are the places to look for such principles.

At the other end of the continuum⁴¹, we have what Green calls “the historian’s critique of political theory,”⁴² advanced especially by intellectual historians of the so-called Cambridge School. Intellectual historians such as Quentin Skinner, John Pocock, and John Dunn argue in different ways that historical approaches are superior to philosophical approaches to the study of political thought, insofar as the researcher is interested in what past political thinkers actually intended to say. They argue that the study of the historical context of various arguments is the most important factor in understanding such arguments, that no questions are timeless, and that the philosophical pursuit of truth is questionable, as truth itself is a historically and discursively contingent concept.⁴³ The primary aim of Cambridge School inspired political theory is to reconstruct the actors’ perspectives, how they understood the questions they faced, why they answered them in the way they did, and what immediate political aims they were trying to realize.⁴⁴ They argue that rationality, formal logic, and truth-claims are themselves historically situated practices; what counts as rational and as claims to truth are shaped by conditions of history, discourse, and power. The approach to political theory, which this article proposes, shares with such intellectual historians the importance of history for political thinking, but such intellectual historians would disagree with the ambition of such historical study. The study of history ought not, these historians would say, to provide answers for us, but to provide a better understanding of them (that is, the authors of the past). Again, like the purity of the analytical philosophical position can seldom be upheld outside methodological debates, scholars in the Cambridge School tradition also have difficulties exercising intellectual historical research merely for the sake of the historical actors themselves. When Quentin Skinner, the most famous exponent of ‘the historian’s critique of political theory,’ excavates his third concept of liberty – freedom as non-domination – through readings of the republican tradition from ancient Rome to Renaissance Florence, he also argues that freedom as non-domination is a better way to understand freedom in contemporary politics than the liberal idea of freedom as non-interference from Thomas Hobbes to Isaiah Berlin or positive freedom as self-realization as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.⁴⁵

Thinking in Exemplars

In contrast to the recent methodological militancy, the understanding of political thinking this article puts forward deliberately combines history, theory, and politics. It has aims somewhat similar to the analytical philosopher – it wants to provide principles that are good or just or democratic, but it seeks to find these principles through the sources of the intellectual historian, in history, so to speak. Below, I engage briefly with one exemplary thinker in this regard, Niccolò Machiavelli, because he thematizes such a form of political thinking, which effortlessly combines untimely resources and timely concerns through the creative and imaginative employment of historical examples. It is beyond the scope of the article to discuss Machiavelli’s republican political theory in detail; instead, I sketch the political aims of such exemplary political thinking.

Scholars of Machiavelli have repeatedly pointed to his questionable analysis of ancient Rome in The Discourses as well as his problematic mode of comparing different regime forms throughout history in both The Discourses and The Prince.⁴⁶ But instead of lamenting his unbalanced factual account of the institutional workings of ancient Rome, I argue that Machiavelli is trying to accomplish something rather different with his political thinking. In the preface to Book 1 of The Discourses, Machiavelli famously argues that he “has decided to enter upon a new way, as yet untrodden by anyone else.”⁴⁷ This untrodden path has been interpreted as many different things: His political realism, his break with Aristotelianism and Christianity, or his stress on conflict instead of harmony could be examples, but if one reads the statement in the context of the preface, this untrodden path has clearly to do with how history is to be understood, read and used by the political thinker. According to Machiavelli, the weakness of the Florentine city-state had precisely to do with “the lack of a proper appreciation of history” and “the delicacies it compromises.”⁴⁸ Instead of understanding history as a static object, which the disinterested spectator can “take pleasure in hearing” about,⁴⁹ Machiavelli understands history as a dynamic reservoir full of creative potentialities of imitation and inspiration. Florence can acquire the greatness of Rome by learning from this city, imitating creatively the things that are worth imitating. In the preface, Machiavelli also gives his reasons for “comparing ancient with modern events,” namely that “those who read what I have to say may the more easily draw those practical lessons which one should seek to obtain from the study of history.”⁵⁰ Thus, the study of history can provide practical lessons, or rephrased, it provides political lessons for those who seek it. Importantly for Machiavelli and for the kind of political thinking I seek to draw attention to, Machiavelli’s use of history is not concerned with representing the past as accurately as possible. Instead, he seeks to employ historical examples in order to advance a political project – that of republicanism – which cannot be reduced to the historical situation in which this project emerges. In short, Machiavelli uses the historical experiences of the Roman Republic for his own political purposes, and as Christopher Holman has aptly pointed out, by stipulating “an alternative mental image of Rome,” Machiavelli “is capable of stimulating a practical imperative that stretches into a future marked by the production of the new.”⁵¹ Hence, examples from the past can be utilized in contemporary political projects.

This is also why Machiavelli ends his recommendations in The Prince by deliberating on the conditions of uniting the dispersed city-states on the Italian peninsula of his time into a unified political entity. Machiavelli contemplates how a prince, if he follows the ancient wisdom provided in the book, would be able to unite the Italian city-states due to the opportuneness of the moment. Such exemplary political thinking, thus, is an encounter of the Machiavellian forces of fortuna and virtù: Fortuna denotes the present, political circumstances and the contingent historical conditions from which political thinking (and action) takes place, and virtù signifies the imaginative and creative employment of the past in order to make the moment opportune for a certain political project. This is indeed also how Machiavelli – and in addition much political theory – has been practiced and read. If one wants to acquire in-depth knowledge of the constitutional mechanisms or the historical developments of republican Rome, one will do wisely not to rely primarily on Machiavelli’s Discourses⁵², but if one seeks a theory of republicanism, or if the political thinker finds himself in a position similar to Machiavelli’s, his teachings could turn out as productive and inspiring. This is what Louis Althusser alludes to in his book Machiavelli and Us, which simply by the title seems to suggest a productive relationship between the untimely and the timely. Here, Althusser discusses G.W.F. Hegel’s essay On the German Constitution, in which Hegel elaborates on the possibilities of uniting the German states into a constitutional monarchy through a discussion on Machiavelli. That is, Hegel finds himself in a similar situation as Machiavelli in The Prince. Althusser writes: “Machiavelli does not speak to Hegel in past tense, as the founder, already old, of a theory of politics. He ‘speaks’ to him in the present and, quite specifically, of the German political situation.”⁵³ When the political theorist reads history, as well as past political thinkers, history becomes a resource for the present concerns of this political theorist. This does not mean that political thinkers partake in a dialogue on timeless, abstract questions (pace analytical political philosophy and some versions of Straussianism) because the questions they are preoccupied with are indeed timely, as political questions result from fortuna and are made important by our present political situation; nor that political theorists can predominantly use the past to denaturalize the concepts of the present (pace Cambridge School) because the past can be worthy of a selective re-appropriation and imitation; but instead that the past and its exemplary events and thinkers are the vantage point from which we think our present and future (pace analytical political philosophy).

Such a notion of ‘exemplarity’ is important for the type of political thinking I seek to outline. In moments of low spirit and political confusion, the political thinker can use examples to reassure himself of alternative routes and innovative suggestions. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, the importance of examples to the political thinker resides in “the knowledge that the great which once existed was at least possible once and may well again be possible sometime.”⁵⁴ By a selective reappropriation, “the past must be described as something worthy of imitation, something that can be imitated and is possible a second time.”⁵⁵ In this regard, Arendt was clearly using history and contemporary politics as exemplars in the epilogue to The Origins, as her objective with the epilogue was to infuse hope and inspiration. As such, political thinking aims to inspire actions in the present by uplifting exemplary events from the past. To the modern historian or to the ‘methodist,’ such an understanding of history seems unscientific, subjective, and too heavily politicized, as it provides no systematized way of selecting events or thinkers to treat as examples or models. In the vocabulary of this article, it shamelessly blends history, theory, and politics. Moreover, exemplary thinking is not akin to the historiographic practices of the moderns but – in contrast – is a continuation of ancient historiographic practices. One of Machiavelli’s primary interlocutors, Livy, opens his The History of Rome deliberately stating the exemplary ambitions of his historical study: “This it is which is particularly salutary and profitable in the study of history, that you behold instances of every variety of conduct [exempli documenta] displayed on a conspicuous monument [monumento]; that from thence you may select for yourself and for your country that which you may imitate.”⁵⁶ According to Livy, hence, what the exemplary thinker does is erect monuments of particular historical events in order to choose which events (or institutions, constitutions, or systems) to imitate. Machiavelli himself mentions in the dedication letter to Lorenzo de Medici in The Prince that in order to show him his devotion, he offers him the most valuable gift he knows: “the knowledge of the deeds of great men.”⁵⁷ Later in Machiavelli’s recommendations to his prince, he mentions how “above all else, he must do as some eminent men before him have done, who elected to imitate someone who had been praised and honoured before them, and always keep in mind his deeds and actions.”⁵⁸

How can historical examples guide political thinking? In explicating the way Arendt uses historical examples of council democracy and workers’ councils throughout the modern revolutions, especially in On Revolution (1963), to develop a theory of revolutionary constitutionalism, Maurizio Passerin d‘Entrèves argues that in going back and forth between historical events and abstract theory,

The Paris Commune, the Russian Soviets, the German Revolutionary Councils of 1918-19, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, all these events possess the kind of exemplary validity that make them of universal significance, while still retaining their own specificity and uniqueness. Thus, by attending to these events in their particularity the historian or judging spectator is able to illuminate their universal import and thereby preserve them as ‘examples’ for posterity.⁵⁹

In the phrasing of Passerin d‘Entrèves, Arendt’s theory of revolutionary constitutionalism is developed from the ‘specificity and uniqueness’ of the historical experiences with workers’ councils, and then extrapolated from the specific events to their ‘universal significance,’ hereby preserving them as ‘examples for posterity.’ As Arendt herself said, when writing on the Hungarian councils, “events, past and present, – not social forces and historical trends, nor questionnaires and motivation research, nor any other gadgets in the arsenal of social science – are the true, the only reliable teachers of political science, as they are the most trustworthy source of information for those engaged in politics.”⁶⁰ It is in this regard that “political thought” must be conducted “as it arises out of the actuality of political incidents … thought itself arises out of the living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.”⁶¹ According to Arendt, then, the exemplary political theorist is akin to a pearl diver, who “descends to the bottom of the sea” in order “to pry loose the rich and strange, the pearls and corals in depths.”⁶² Because “process of decay is also a process of crystallization”⁶³ the pearl diver can bring back the pearls of the past and let them shine in the present. There is no nostalgia or longing for the past in this exercise; moreover the pearl diver performs an “act of remembering, in the sense of a creative act of rethinking which sets free the lost potentials of the past.”⁶⁴ It is not an attempt to restore some accurate historical judgment on some actors or on events for their sake, but to rearticulate and remember events and deeds for our sake, to utilize them in our time. It is not that these events ought to be directly translated into contemporary politics or provide trans-historical, institutional blueprints. Instead, the excavated pearls function as inspiration, as raw materials for political theorizing. As formulated by Passerin d‘Entrèves, through a “selective reappropriation can we discover the past anew, endow it with meaning for present, and make it a source of inspiration for the future yet to come.”⁶⁵ In agreement with Ronald Beiner, I assert that “exemplary validity is of crucial importance, for it supplies the basis for a conception of political science centered on particulars (stories, historical examples), not universals (the concept of historical process; general laws of history).”⁶⁶ As Arendt herself argues, “most concepts in the historical and political sciences are of this restricted nature; they have their origin in some particular historical incident, and we then proceed to make it ‘exemplary’ – to see in the particular what is valid for more than one case.”⁶⁷

Joshua Foa Dienstag has recently discussed such exemplary political thinking, and he argues that this approach has been normal in political thought before the contemporary emphasis on methodology and the idea of the domain of politics as governed by law-like relations between causes and effects.

Dienstag draws attention to works such as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as classics of a form of political thinking, which essentially functions as an encyclopedia of past examples of political conduct. Moreover, Dienstag concludes that the arguably greatest exercise in such a ‘political theory of examples’ is The Federalist Papers. Confronted with the question of how to unify the 13 independent states into one political system under one constitution, the papers “support general conclusions with far-flung historical examples and appeals to the authority of these examples to support practical suggestions about the appropriate structure of government.”⁶⁸ When the political thinker uses past examples to answer contemporary questions, “he arrives at more general conclusions via induction, but it is the examples themselves that carry the weight of persuasion. The conclusions themselves add little to what an astute reader could already glean from the bits of history that the texts have assembled.”⁶⁹

Vision and Imagination

What are the primary intellectual capacities of the Machiavellian, exemplary thinker? What is the aim of such political thinking? In short, the aim is to provide alternative understandings of political life and to propose different ways to organize the polity. Moreover, the aim is polemical; it is to take sides, to imagine transformations – or to argue against them – of the political community. The exemplary events of the past ought to be judged from the perspective and the political aims of the theorist and the specific community he addresses. This mode of political thinking cannot acquire the level of objectivity and generality that other forms of philosophizing might have, as the apolitical philosopher “must separate himself from the political community” because “only then can he ask and struggle to answer the deepest questions about the meaning and purpose of political association and the appropriate structure of the community (of every community) and its government. This kind of knowledge one can have only from the outside.”⁷⁰ Instead, exemplary political thinking seeks to answer the question of what we are to do and think in this moment. The italicized words refer to the fact that this form of political thinking must make a decision on who we are (that is, it is polemical), of what this community must do, understood very broadly (that is, it is engaged and not hostile to action), and involves an analysis of the present conditions of why and how this community must act in this way (that is, it is oriented towards the present). Such political knowledge “answers the questions: What is the meaning and purpose of this association? What is the appropriate structure of our community and government?”⁷¹ This mode of political theory is not disengaged or detached; it does not step back and leave the community in order to think. It does not ask, in general, what is the right thing to do. Instead, “it has a crucial addition: what is the right thing for us to do?”⁷² In their analyses of twentieth century workers’ councils, especially the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the spectacular reemergence of the council system, Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt similarly made this ‘for us’-qualification. According to Arendt, “what happened in Hungary happened nowhere else, and the twelve days of revolution contained more history than the twelve years since the Red Army had ‘liberated’ the country from Nazi domination,”⁷³ and Castoriadis states that “I hold that these weeks – like the few weeks of the Paris Commune – are, for us, no less important and no less meaningful than three thousand years of Egyptian pharaonic history.”⁷⁴ History for the exemplary thinker, in short, does not equal the accurate registration of the monotonous flow of time, but instead a dynamic reservoir of experiences and entangled temporalities.

Now, one could ask: What becomes of the quest for truth, impartiality, and universality, which is also a part of the activity of philosophizing? If the above reflections constitute a specific form of political theory, how is this different from interest-based, political agitation? One could answer these questions with another set of questions, which provide perspective on the form of political thinking I advance: Should we discard Plato’s worries about majoritarianism because of his untenable understanding of human nature and social class? Does Machiavelli’s highly idiosyncratic analysis of Roman history discredit his novel theory of republicanism? Is it wisest to ignore Thomas Hobbes’ depiction of a society without public authority because of his monarchical sympathies? Does Edmund Burke’s hastily composed indictment against the French Revolution dismiss the project of conservatism? Should we disregard Tocqueville’s insights into the consequences of modern equality because of his lack of rigorous historical comparison? Ought we abandon the differences between ancient and modern liberty because of Benjamin Constant’s consciously polemical juxtaposition between the two? Should we neglect Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere because of his highly idealized analysis of the modern republic of letters?

Most often, I suspect, we do not disregard these important insights into the conditions of freedom, the nature of equality, the need for political authority, the circumstances of societal change, and the value of the public sphere because of the lack of rigorousness and exactness in the historical analysis, which are their empirical foundations, or because of the politically motivated vantage point of their writings. What I mean to suggest by these questions is that most political thinking before the behavioral revolution in social science effortlessly blends history and theory in some form of politically motivated argument. Now, this is a good place to discuss what it means to be ‘politically motivated’ when thinking politically. This also sheds light on what we specifically can learn from historical events, which we cannot learn from thought experiments or purely ahistorical or nonempirical forms of political theorizing. That the political theorist is ‘politically motivated’ means, as already mentioned, that she has reasons for engaging with questions of, say, democracy and justice that are outside narrow academic arguments – such as, for example, a gap in the literature. Instead, the political theorist finds a further understanding of democracy and justice important for the shared good of the community because these categories speak to fundamental challenges or experiences of this community. This means that value judgments are an integral part of political theorizing. Elisabeth Anderson has, in a different vocabulary, discussed the use of value judgments in science and argues for a so-called bidirectional influence between facts and norms.⁷⁵ The orthodox view of the scientific process is that values ought not to influence the observation of facts, and hence, that facts cannot influence values. Anderson argues that such view is absurd, as few would deny that experiences (facts) actually influence our values, but also that our values effect our observation of facts⁷⁶. What is important, according to Anderson, is that we are not dogmatic in our values, insofar as we will not change them, even when facts subsequently point in the same direction. That political theory has an undogmatic, but political kernel means that facts and values influence each other; that we see facts in certain ways due to our commitments and values, but that we are simultaneously open and receptive to letting experiences influence our values.

As such, political theorists are not interested in a precise recommendation of a specific level of taxation, the detailed mechanisms of electoral systems, or the precise numbers of representatives in parliament. Instead, political theory in the register of the exemplary thinker is occupied with why certain principles or institutions ought or ought not to dominate the political life of a specific community. The bidirectional influence between facts and values is also one reason why I argue for a political theory that grounds itself in historical examples. Because, what can historical examples tell us that thought experiments, for instance, cannot? Firstly, historical examples testify to human possibility and creativity, as they show the range of possible human action. Secondly, and more pertinent for this discussion, theorizing politically from the outset of historical examples aids political theory with being undogmatic, yet political. It might be that we start to investigate certain historical, political institutions or historical societies because our values suggest that these political forms have certain uniquely democratic features, but that – when we investigate them time and time again⁷⁷ – we will have to admit that they lack the democratic features, which we had hoped for. Political theory, hence – in my reading of the tradition – has never strictly separated fact and value, description, and prescription. What political theorists are interested in, that is, the ‘facts’ that make up political theoretical analysis, are never just ‘out there’ to be collected and analyzed. As Wolin argues in the introduction to Politics and Vision, political theoretical ‘facts’

represent, instead, an added element something created by the political theorist. Concepts like ‘power’, ‘authority’, ‘consent’, and so on are not real ‘things’, although they are intended to point to some significant aspect about political things. Their function is to render political facts significant either for purposes of analysis, criticism, or justification, or a combination of all three.⁷⁸

Hence, political theory as I understand it – and as Wolin describes it – is situated in the encounter between two different forms of vision. Firstly, vision is associated with seeing and perception, that is, with the observation of facts. But secondly, and more importantly, for political thinkers, vision is also associated with something normative – ‘I have a vision’ – and something imaginative – ‘I had a vision.’ Political thinkers inject imaginative vision into the facts they see. According to Wolin, political thinkers do this deliberately because the facts they are interested in cannot speak for themselves. Rather, political thinkers believe “that fancy, exaggeration, even extravagance, sometimes permit us to see things that are not otherwise apparent.”⁷⁹ Through fancy, exaggeration, and extravagance of imaginative vision, “theorists have given us pictures of political life in miniature, pictures in which what is extraneous to the theorist’s purpose had been deleted.”⁸⁰

One crucial capacity of the exemplary and visionary political thinker, who oscillates between the untimely and the timely, is then, I argue, imagination. Imagination, as Linda Zerilli argues, “is not bound to the law of causality, but is productive and spontaneous, not merely reproductive of what is already known, but generative of new forms and figures.”⁸¹ The relation between history and theory, which the exemplary thinker establishes, is not a product of method; it is neither empirical nor strictly logical, “but imaginative: we create new relations between things that have none … Every extension of a political concept always involves an imaginative opening up of the world that allows us to see and articulate relations between things that have none (in any necessary, logical sense).”⁸² This operation of ‘articulating relations between things that have none’ is crucial for exemplary and visionary political thinking because it allows for new subjects into the realm of politics (for a long time, there was no relation between women and politics) and for new issues to be politicized (for a long, there was no relation between the climate and politics). Strict methodological rules can never articulate relations between things that have none because of the rule-bounded nature of method. This is reason why I, along with Wolin and Arendt, understand political thinking as somewhat antithetical to method and instead insist on the politically motivated nature of this practice. As Arendt asks in ‘Truth and Politics,’

have not generations of historians and philosophers of history demonstrated the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data) and then fitted into a story that can be told only in a certain perspective)?⁸³

This obviously does not mean that one can write exemplary political theory as one pleases, but that the political theorist “has the right to rearrange the facts in accordance with its [his] own perspective.”⁸⁴ With distinction from Reinhart Koselleck, the exemplary political thinker is not only using concepts to register facts and experiences (Begriffe); instead, they are predominantly using concepts to forge reality into being (that is, anticipatory concepts, Vorgriffe).⁸⁵ What I intend to say with the distinction between Begriffe and Vorgriffe is, in a way, already entailed in Anderson’s bidirectional influence between facts and values and Wolin’s dual understanding of vision: On the one hand, political thinkers are interested in the historical examples of past – they are dwelling in the untimely, registering and observing facts about prior political institutions, constitutional arrangements and legendary events; on the other hand they are seeking to forge a new reality into being, as they are envisioning new political modes of existence through reviewing the possibilities and principles of democracy, freedom, equality, justice (or whatever they are interested in) in their present moment.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have formulated a specific understanding of political theory in a number of different ways: political theory as mixing history, theory, and politics; political theory as alternating between the untimely and the timely; political theory as exemplary, political theory as involving vision as observing and vision as imagination; political theory as oscillating between Begriffe and Vorgriffe. What these formulations have in common is an understanding of a somewhat hostile relationship between political thinking and methodology, if we, by methodology understand a set of apolitical procedures and instruments, which secure a certainty of knowledge on political affairs as well as dictate the questions we should pose as political theorists. Instead, these different formulations of political theory suggest that this practice is deeply political and polemical in terms of the questions it asks, the way it lets the material (past events, present politics) speak to these questions, and the manner in which conclusions are drawn. This does not mean that facts can come to mean anything in political thinking; the historical examples that political thinking employs have a certain resistance to some forms of interpretations,⁸⁶ but it means that the empirical material that political thinkers employ to support their conclusions do not have the final word on the validity and inspirational value of such conclusions. Such final word is the privilege of the society, which the political thinker addresses – Arendt’s and Castoriadis’ ‘for us’-qualification.

The central argument of the paper, thus, has been that while doing political theory, methodological considerations ought not take center stage, which is, in itself, obviously, a methodological argument. Hence, in the spirit of practicing political theory polemically and normatively, I end the paper by briefly discussing two recent, pivotal political events and sketching out how the exemplary political theorist might analyze and judge these events. Supposed one is asked to compare and evaluate the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement of 2011 and its occupation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan with the January 6^th protests at Capitol Hill in 2021 and is confronted with the argument that both these events involved public mass gatherings, occupation of public spaces, intense political agitation, and massive law-breaking. The January 6^th events involved an element of political violence and conscious obstruction of the electoral process that the 59-day long occupation of Zuccotti Park did not. But, the exemplary political theorist might also see another vital difference in the events. While the January 6^th events did not entail any revolutionary demands or organization – it ‘only’ aspired to keep Donald Trump in the Oval Office – the OWS movement prefigured an alternative political reality in its mode of organization and decision-making. The OWS movement’s critique of the 1% and its easy translation of economic might into political power, as well as the inherent elitism of the political institutions of representative democracy, was sought to be replaced by the way the encampment of Zuccotti Park was organized. The numerous sub-committees, federated working groups, daily general assemblies, and procedural mechanisms of hand waving, clapping, and the human microphone were examples of small-scale democratic innovations that sought to prefigure a political reality beyond representative democracy. In such a process, where the struggle against the existing political system entails the very prefiguration of a more democratic, egalitarian, and participatory one – something which the January 6^th events did not in any way – a political theorist might see a reactivation of the revolution tradition from the American and French Revolution and onwards, where the act of revolution always also carried with it alternative modes of political organization. From the New England townhalls and Parisian revolutionary clubs in the late eighteenth century, over the société populaires of the 1871 Paris Commune, the self-managing soviets of revolutionary St. Petersburg in 1905, the soldiers’ and workers’ soviets of Petrograd during the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the German workers’ and sailors’ räte during the German Revolution of 1918-1919 to the Hungarian council movement of 1956, the political theorist might see certain similarities with Occupy Wall Street, which help see the 59-day long occupation in a different historical, conceptual and theoretical perspective.⁸⁷ The primary importance for the exemplary political theorist is not to mention the numerous differences between all these revolutionary events, but, as I quoted Linda Zerilli for, to “create new relations between things that have none,” as “every extension of a political concept always involves an imaginative opening up of the world that allows us to see and articulate relations between things that have none (in any necessary, logical sense).”⁸⁸ The significance of the OWS movement – for us – can thus be illuminated by its entry into a political tradition, which it might or might not belong, and by having political principles ascribed to it, which it might or might not deserve. These judgments, in the end, are not questions of method, but of continual scholarly and public debate.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sheldon Wolin, “History and Theory: Methodism Redivivus,” in Tradition, Interpretation and Science: Political Theory in American Academy, ed. J.S. Nelson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 43.

2 Benjamin Barber, “The Politics of Political Science: ‘Value-Free’ Theory and the Wolin-Strauss Dust-Up of 1963,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 539–45.

3 Leo Strauss, “An Epilogue,” in Essays in the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique, ed. H.J. Storing (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 327.

4 Barber, “The Politics of Political Science,” 541.

5 For a host of statistical data, see Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 99–131.

6 Christian Rostbøll, “The Non-Instrumental Value of Democracy: The Freedom Argument,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 22, no. 2 (2015): 267–78.

7 Adrian Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes,” American Journal of Political Science 65, no. 2 (2021): 359–72.

8 Blau also recognizes this aspect of political theory, insofar as he mentions how learning from the past can offer new answers for problems in contemporary politics, Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes,” 365.

9 Nicholas Tampio, “Political Theory and the Untimely,” Political Theory 2 (2016): 1.

10 Tampio, “Political Theory and the Untimely,” 1–2.

11 Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes.”

12 William Connolly, Political Science and Ideology (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1967), 4–8.

13 Arendt in Richard Bernstein, Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996), 133. Italics added.

14 As mentioned in the introduction, good introductions to a host of different methodological approaches within political theory are David Leopold and Marc Stears, eds., Political Theory: Methods and Approaches (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Adrian Blau, ed., Methods in Analytical Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

15 For an introduction to the methodology of analytical political philosophy, see Christian List and Laura Valentini, “The Methodology of Political Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, ed. H. Cappelen et al. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016); for an introduction to the analysis of ideology, see Micheal Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996); for an introduction to ‘post-modern’ approaches to political thought, see Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Post-Modern Approaches to the History of Political Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook to the History of Political Philosophy, ed. G. Klosko (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).

16 Wolin, “History and Theory: Methodism Redivivus,” 43. In the hope of increasing the methodological awareness of political theorists, Blau has recently argued that “political theorists have no handbook on how to apply the methods we use,” which for him is a shame, as “healthy disciplines see disputes about method,” Methods in Analytical Political Theory, 1, 2.

17 For a critical anthology devoted to Skinner’s methodology, see John Dunn, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); for a discussion on John Rawls’ method of reflexive equilibrium, see for example Daniel Little, “Reflective Equilibrium and Justification,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 3 (1984): 373–87; for Habermas’ method of rational reconstruction, see Daniel Gaus, “Rational. Reconstruction as a Method of Political Theory: Between Social Critique and Empirical Political Science,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 20, no. 4 (2013): 553–70; for introduction to the methodology of discourse analysis in the Laclau-Mouffian register, see Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Philips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London, UK: Routledge, 2002), 24–59.

18 Rogers Smith, “Reconnecting Political Theory to Empirical Inquiry, or, A Return to the Cave,” in The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and Inquiry in American Politics, ed. R. Sisson (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 68.

19 Walter Berns, “Voting Studies,” in Essays in the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique, ed. H.J. Storing (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 55.

20 Wolin, “History and Theory: Methodism Redivivus,” 45.

21 Blau partly disputes this claim by highlighting, as examples, how Plato’s dialectical method, Machiavelli’s scorn of abstract reasoning, Hobbes’ deductive logics, and Bentham and Mill’s critique of intuitionism influence their theoretical arguments and political judgments. Blau, Methods in Analytical Political Theory, 4–5.

22 Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as Vocation,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 4 (1969): 1080.

23 Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 3 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 251.

24 Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London, UK: Routledge, 1994), 126.

25 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1993), 232–33.

26 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7–17.

27 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 247.

28 Ibid.

29 Blau, “How (Not) to Use the History of Political Thought for Contemporary Purposes,” 365–8.

30 Blau, Methods in Analytical Political Theory, 1.

31 Jeffrey C. Isaac, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” Political Theory 23, no. 4 (1995): 642.

32 Isaac, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” 642.

33 Kuhn in ibid.

34 Jeffrey Edward Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 425–41.

35 Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” 429.

36 For this argument, see Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” 430.

37 Andrew Vincent, The Nature of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85.

38 List and Valentini, “The Methodology of Political Theory,” 525.

39 Quoted in Tom Sorell, “On Saying No to the History of Philosophy” in Analytical Philosophy and History of Philosophy, ed. T. Sorell (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 44.

40 See especially the first chapter of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971).

41 One major school of thought, which this continuum hardly captures is the political thought of Leo Strauss and his followers. Famously, Strauss favored a so-called ‘esoteric reading’ of the classics in the history of political thought, by arguing that the real message of classic political texts was hidden ‘between the lines’ due to the author’s fear of persecution because of their texts’ subversive content, Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952). Strauss thus depicted a fundamental conflict between philosophy and politics, but in contrast to Arendt, Strauss favored the domain of philosophy and its perennial problems over the messiness, situatedness and conflictual nature of politics. See also Mark Bevir, “Esotericism and Modernity: An Encounter with Leo Strauss,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 (2007): 201–218. While Strauss indeed thought that there are lessons to be learned from the history of political thought, these lessons are not to be used by political actors as points of orientation in their concrete struggles, but by philosophers in the quest for truth.

42 Green, “Political Theory as Both Philosophy and History: A Defense Against Methodological Militancy,” 434.

43 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

44 For the classic statement, see “Meaning in Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1: Regarding Method, 57–89.

45 Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Quentin Skinner, “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 237–68.

46 Christopher Holman, “Machiavelli’s Constellative Use of History,” Theory and Event 19, no. 2 (2016), online publication, no page numbers available.

47 Niccol Machiavelli, The Discourses (London, UK: Penguin Classics. 2003), 97. Joshua Foa Dienstag also argues that the novelty of the path trodden by Machiavelli is not his so-called realism in politics, but his use of historical examples as a way to guide his understanding of the contemporary situation, see “The Example of History and the History of Examples in Political Theory,” New Literary History 48 (2017): 34–85.

48 Machiavelli, The Discourses, 98.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid, 99.

51 Holman, “Machiavelli’s Constellative Use of History,” no page numbers available.

52 If one has a lot of time on his hands, one should read Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome (London, UK: Richard Bentley, 1864), which is indeed a historical landmark on the subject.

53 Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us (London, UK: Verso, 1999), 9.

54 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History of Life (Cambridge, UK: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 16. Italics in original.

55 Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History of Life, 17.

56 Livy, The History of Rome, 1772, 12 see http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19725/19725-h/19725-h.htm

57 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5.

58 Machiavelli, The Prince, 52.

59 Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 114–115. Italics added.

60 Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” The Journal of Politics 20, no. (1958): 8.

61 Ibid

62 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 14. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Walter Benjamin (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 50–51.

63 Arendt, “Introduction,” 51.

64 Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of the Narrative,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 167–196, 190.

65 Passerin d’Entrèves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 30–31.

66 Ronald Beiner in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 79.

67 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 85.

68 Foa Dienstag, “The Example of History and the History of Examples in Political Theory,” New Literary History, 488.

69 Ibid, 486.

70 Michael Walzer, “Philosophy and Democracy,” Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 393.

71 Ibid. Italics in original.

72 Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1987), 23. Italics in original.

73 Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution,” 5. Italics added.

74 Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, 259. Italics in original.

75 Elisabeth Anderson, “Use of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons form a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce,” Hypatia 19, no. 1 (2004): 1–24.

76 Anderson, “Use of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons form a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce,” 11–18.

77 Anderson highlights the difference between a mainstream study on the consequences of divorce, which takes for granted that divorce has negative consequences for women, and a study on divorce conducted by a group of feminist researchers, who because of their values look for different things in the facts, such as divorce as a vehicle for the autonomy and self-determination of women. In this way values make us see facts differently.

78 Sheldon Wolin, 2004, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 6.

79 Wolin, Politics and Visions, 18.

80 Ibid, 19.

81 Linda Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2015): 163.

82 Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Arendt,” 181.

83 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 238.

84 Ibid, 239.

85 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 263, 285.

86 In ‘Truth and Politics’, Arendt asserts – just after having argued that the political thinker has the right to rearrange the facts according to the story, she wants to tell – that no matter which story the political thinker wants to tell about the responsibility of the outbreak of WWI, she cannot argue that Belgium invaded Germany and not the other way around. There are some historical facts “whose indestructibility has been taken for granted even by the most extreme and sophisticated believers in historicism,” Arendt, Between Past and Future, 239.

87 For a historical and conceptual reconstruction of the revolutionary tradition in post-war political thought, see Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen, Visions of Council Democracy: Castoriadis, Lefort, Arendt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

88 Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Arendt,” 181.