Failures of Political Thinking

Abstract

The article investigates failures of political thinking as a normal and endemic phenomenon, yet one that is theoretically under-conceptualised. It postulates three criteria for such failure: (1) the failure to deliver ideationally what the political theory in question has itself undertaken through its creator(s) to deliver; (2) the failure to take on board the constraints imposed on the initial construction of a theory or argument by the features and structure of political concepts; and (3) the failure of the specific epistemologies and ideologies that underlie political theorising to confer sufficient conclusiveness on the theories that emerge from them. The underlying causes of those three criteria invoke, in turn, three problems with political language and argument: first, the impossibility of keeping meaning constant over time; second, the indeterminacy that surrounds the eliciting and defining of the concepts and values a theory desires to promote; and third, the inevitable ineffectiveness of offering sufficient comprehensive detail in prescribing paths of political change or reform. Focusing on normatively prescriptive political thinking with regard to the construction of political macro visions and single overarching regulative principles, the article examines classical and contemporary instances of political thought. It studies their failures in the forms of uncontrollable and absent temporal trajectories of argument; conceptual polysemy and decontestation; and the impediments normative thinking encounters when applied to the distinctive circumstances of every individual. Finally, it dismisses any necessary connection between theories of failure and conservatism, arguing instead that liberal epistemologies can accommodate some salient conceptual failures in thinking about politics. The article concludes that modest failure and temporary success may not be that distinct from one another; anything more spectacular in either direction should cause political theorists to ponder.