Among the many things I’ve been meaning to post on over the past week but haven’t is Jacob Levy’s excellent post on the differences between political philosophers and political theorists. Since I found myself nodding my head along with most of it, I find that (alas) I have little to add here, except in confirmation. My undergrad degree was in both politics and philosophy, but I certainly identify far more with the latter discipline. And reading the stuff that falls more squarely within the (blurry) boundaries of “political theory” often, I’ll confess, annoys me. Lots of it—my archetypes here are (some of) Ben Barber and Allan Bloom—strikes me as a great deal of handwaving and namedropping, thick rhetorical ornaments plastered over trivial insights, that quite effectively manufacture the illusion of profundity on a first pass. Like binging on cotton candy, it’s pleasant going down, and it’ll even make you feel full, but you haven’t actually consumed much more than air and sugar. It tries to mingle philosophy with some history and real political science, and manages to take the worst of all worlds. You get the abstraction of philosophy without any of the precision or rigor, while the history is injected either as a shallow display of erudition or as an illustrative bit of color—narrative reduced to anecdote. Maybe I’m just focussing too much on bad political theory, but I’ve never been able to wean myself from the suspicion that the “richness” of the stuff we’re calling “theory” here is little more than a generous helping of pretty flummery, injected with the dual purpose of covering the author’s low tolerance for disciplined analysis and giving the reader the satisfaction of feeling he’s read something Deep. In other words, if you haven’t the analytical skills to do either real philosophy or pure history, you can flash about what you know about history to disguise the poverty of argumentation: the “political theorist” is born. A bit like what someone said about Murray Rothbard once upon a time: a hell of an economist as philosophers go, and a pretty good philosopher, for an economist.

Obviously, I’m casting too wide a net—Judith Shklar and Jacob and probably Hayek also fall in the “theory’ camp, and none of this really applies to them. Still, enough of a pattern to make me want to run screaming from politics altogether and work on modal logic or something.