Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 25 ^ No.

2, 2002
ISSN 0080^6757
# Nordic Political Science Association

Why Political Science Needs Political

Theory1

Brian Barry*

Normative political theory and empirical social science have a reciprocal relationship. This
thesis is illustrated by taking up two topics: one is social exclusion; the other is ethnicity and
discrimination.

My theme was given to me by asking myself whether, as a normative

political theorist, I might be accepting the Johan Skytte Prize in Political
Science under false pretences. I have succeeded in reassuring myself on that
matter, and I would like to explain my line of reasoning, which I hope others
besides myself will ¢nd persuasive. In brief, my claim is that political theory
is integral to the enterprise of political science and to the social sciences
more generally.
Why do we study politics at all? No doubt we care in a perfectly
disinterested way about what happened to the universe in the ¢rst thirty
seconds after the Big Bang. But we care about politics in a di¡erent, more
intimate way: politics is made by our fellow human beings and a¡ects us all.
As Gunner Myrdal pointed out a long time ago, while it is a valid aim to
pursue objectivity in the social sciences, there is no way of deciding what is
worth studying independent of our concerns for the future of the world as
human beings. Out of the in¢nite variety of social phenomena, the social
scientist must select a subject, and the only reasonable basis on which to do
so is to study the institutions and processes that make a signi¢cant impact
on human lives. It follows from this that, unless they are to be sterile, the
empirical enquiries of social scientists have to be shaped by normative
questions. At the same time, it is clear that, if political theorists want their
ideas to have any application to the real world, they will have to take
account of what the empirical research says.
This is all very abstract, and I have no intention of continuing any further
in this vein. Instead, I want to illustrate my theme by talking about two
current controversies. One is the correct way of specifying the concept of

* Brian Barry, 730 International A¡airs Building, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street,
New York, NY 10027, USA.

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social exclusion. The other is the way in which the ideas of equal treatment
and non-discrimination should be applied to deal with the presence of ethnic
religious or cultural minorities within a country. I shall begin, then, with
social exclusion.
The concept of social exclusion has been largely the product of the policy
community within Western Europe over the past twenty years or so. It has
always attracted suspicion among those on the left that it was invented as a
way of avoiding talking about poverty, especially during the period in which
Mrs Thatcher's government banned all use of the word `poverty' either
within Britain or in relation to it. But I believe that it has come to be
generally recognised that there is an evil appropriately described as `social
exclusion' that is conceptually distinct from poverty, even if there is a high
correlation between being in poverty and being socially excluded.
The origins of the term `social exclusion' guarantee that it is politically
saturated: governments and foundations fund research into social exclusion
because it is perceived as a `problem'. For whom is it a problem? No doubt
for the socially excluded themselves in as far as there are potential or actual
disadvantages to being socially excluded. But the main reason for govern-
ments and foundations to worry about it is that the socially excluded are
thought of as an actual or potential problem for the rest of society because
of their tendency to commit crimes, not have regular jobs, and so on.
Having identi¢ed the causes of social exclusion, social policy analysts
are then expected to propose ways of reducing its incidence and severity,
normally by putting forward programmes requiring action by di¡erent
levels and agencies of government. That this is all premised on certain
assumptions about the role of government becomes apparent when we look
across the Atlantic and observe that in the United States there is no
discourse of social exclusion, even among policy professionals. What we
¢nd instead is an obsessional interest in the `underclass', understood as a
stratum of society (many of them blacks living in inner-city ghettos). These
people are postulated as having pathological values that they transmit from
generation to generation, such as a disposition to avoid legal employment
and a proclivity towards crime (especially violent crime). The `solution' is
seen ^ equally by both Democrats and Republicans ^ as coercing them into
work by eliminating welfare payments and locking up in prison a large
proportion of the population perceived to be at risk: the USA, with 5
percent of the world's population, has 25 percent of the world's prison
population, disproportionately made up of young black males.
Returning to the somewhat more benign political conditions of Western
Europe, let us ask how social exclusion should be de¢ned. This became a
practical question for me a few years ago when the London School of
Economics, where I then worked, was awarded a large grant over ten years
to create a Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE). Those of

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us involved in the project divided into half a dozen research teams,
including a `theory' team consisting of my friend and colleague Julian Le
Grand and myself. Our primary task in the initial phase was to help
formulate a working de¢nition of social exclusion, since you obviously
cannot do empirical research on some phenomenon unless you have ¢rst
identi¢ed the phenomenon. Everybody agreed that, if social exclusion was
going to be worth millions of pounds and hundreds of thousands of person-
hours to study, it had better be some major social evil. Otherwise all this
e¡ort looking for causes and cures could hardly be justi¢ed. But what
exactly was the nature of the evil?
There was complete agreement that social exclusion should be thought
of as a process or set of processes resulting in people being prevented from
participating in the main social, economic and political institutions of their
society. But what exactly was bad about that? There are two approaches
to answering this question, each with deep roots in the political philosophy
of the last two and a half centuries. One would say that what's bad about it
is that it frustrates wants, and the other would say that it denies legitimate
rights. Julian, who (not altogether accidentally, I think) was trained as an
economist, went down the ¢rst route, while I went down the second.
Julian's formulation ran as follows: `A (British) individual is socially
excluded if (a) he/she is geographically resident in the United Kingdom but
(b) for reasons beyond his or her control, he/she cannot participate in the
normal activities of United Kingdom citizens, and (c) he/she would like to
so participate' (Burchardt et al. 1999). I challenged both clause (b) and
clause (c) in this de¢nition. Let me begin with the second of these. Why
should an individual be counted as socially excluded only if he or she
actually would like to participate and cannot do so? It is true that, from a
utilitarian point of view, there is no loss of utility if you are prevented from
doing something you don't want to do anyway, but is that the whole
story?
The Civil Rights movement in the American South in the 1960s began
when a group of black students sat down at the lunch counter of an all-white
restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to move. Nobody
has ever, to my knowledge, maintained that this particular luncheonette
was a mecca for gourmets: no doubt the students could have eaten at least
as well at some all-black establishment. What they were protesting about
was not being allowed to eat there. They believed that in a civilised society
anybody who could a¡ord the price should be able to eat anywhere they
chose, and eventually they won. Racial discrimination is not a desire-
dependent concept. To see this more clearly, consider the parallel case of
job discrimination. If a law ¢rm does not employ Jews, say, then all Jews
who have the quali¢cations to work for the ¢rm and are denied the
possibility of doing so are being discriminated against. We do not have to

109
¢nd out if Joseph Abrams wants a job with the ¢rm to be able to say he is
a member of a class of people who are being subjected to a form of
injustice.
Social exclusion is, I suggest, simply a generalization from the exclusion
of people from lunch counters or jobs in law ¢rms. You su¡er from social
exclusion if you could not participate if you wished to: whether or not you
actually wish to is irrelevant. The evil of social exclusion is not at its core
the frustration of wants but the denial of justice.
I also, as I have said, challenged the second element in Julian's formu-
lation. This said that a British individual is socially excluded if, for reasons
beyond his or her control, he or she cannot participate in the normal
activities of United Kingdom citizens. The trouble with this, if we leave it
without any quali¢cation, is that it lumps together cases in which inability
to participate is wrong and should be remedied and cases in which there is
nothing wrong with it and no change in social policy is called for.
There is, again, an analogy with the analysis of equal opportunity in
employment. Stephen Hawking notwithstanding, someone with his physical
limitations cannot perform very many jobs, and the expense of enabling
Hawking to function as a physicist is so high that it is doubtful that it would
be a sensible use of resources for a society to undertake to pay such costs
to enable anybody less extraordinary to work. Similarly, although an adult
with a mental age of ¢ve may be able to perform some simple tasks, it would
not be a denial of equal opportunity if he or she were unemployable in the
mainstream economy.
Now consider a cultural/linguistic example. It is not, I suggest, a denial
of equal opportunity if those who do not speak the mainstream language
(e.g. English in Britain and the United States or Swedish in Sweden) are
refused employment in any job that requires the employee to be able to
communicate with customers or fellow employees. Somebody who speaks
only some other language cannot reasonably complain of unfair treatment,
because it would be unreasonably burdensome to expect the customers or
fellow workers to learn the language of the aspirant employee. Similarly,
somebody who (for cultural or other reasons) refused to wear a hard hat on
a job in which wearing one could reasonably be demanded as a condition
of employment could not complain of a denial of equal opportunity if they
are ruled out of consideration for employment in that job. Again, the
argument would be that failure to wear a hard hat on, say, a construction
site imposes an unreasonable burden on employers and fellow employees,
because serious injuries hold up work and may result in collateral damage
to other workers, and failing to wear a hard hat increases the risk of serious
injuries.
We can generalise this line of reasoning to the analysis of social exclusion.
Thus, a group whose members speak only a minority language will in

110
practice tend to be one whose members voluntarily associate primarily with
one another. But its members would not be able to play a full part in
mainstream institutions whether they wanted to or not, because they would
not be able to communicate. More precisely, we may again say that it would
be possible if all those with whom they came into contact in the normal
course of participation had learned their language. But, as before, we are
bound to say that this would impose an unreasonable cost on the rest of
society. The members of this group are not, therefore, socially excluded,
even though they cannot play a full part in the life of the society in which
they are members.
We may similarly say that the mentally or physically handicapped do
not su¡er from social exclusion if their mental or physical characteristics
prevent them from taking part in mainstream activities. Here, though, we
should keep in mind the point quite rightly pressed today that how far
certain de¢cits in physical capacity constitute barriers to participation is to
a large extent dependent on decisions about the wheelchair accessibility of
public transport, the way in which streets are con¢gured and the way in
which buildings are constructed. Here, too, the costs (of all kinds) to the rest
of the society of making participation feasible on equal terms (or something
approaching equal terms) may be unreasonable. For example, buses in
New York are wheelchair accessible but the subway is not (no lifts).
Disability rights advocates have pressed for the subways to be made
wheelchair accessible too. But this would be enormously expensive, and the
buses provide an acceptable (if slower) alternative. I would suggest, how-
ever, that it is right to say that more should be spent to enable the disabled
to participate than on accommodating those who cannot participate for
linguistic reasons, because this latter disadvantage is, at least over time,
within the control of the members of the group, provided the government
provides (as it should) all the resources necessary to enable both adults and
children to learn the mainstream language.
Returning for a moment to my opening theme, the course to be taken by
empirical research depends on the way in which the subject of the research
is de¢ned. By dropping motivation, I save investigators from having to ¢nd
out about the attitudes of those who could not participate even if they
wanted to, since they count as excluded whether they actually want to or
not. At the same time, however, I insist that people who would be mentally
or physically incapable of participating in mainstream activities whatever
was done to help them (within reasonable cost limits) are not to count as
socially excluded. This makes the job of research more demanding, because
it now becomes necessary to form some judgement about the validity of
the reasons for somebody's being unable to participate.
In practice, I may add, the course taken by the ¢rst four years of research
(just completed) appears to have followed my de¢nition. Empirical research

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focused on obstacles to participation such as lack of education and money,
and did not try to individualise social exclusion to take account of the
wishes of any given person to participate. At the same time, the research
had a strong public policy focus and therefore concentrated upon things
that government might reasonably be asked to do something about.
Inability to participate for reasons that could not be addressed by public
policy, or could be addressed only at prohibitive cost, did not form part of
the agenda. (The research is summarised in Hills et al. (forthcoming), which
contains my own essay on the concept of social exclusion.)
Let me now move on to my second topic, ethnicity and discrimination.
In the autumn of 2000, a commission on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain,
chaired by a well-known political theorist, Bhikhu Parekh, was published
(Parekh 2000). The Parekh Report, as it immediately came to be known,
rightly emphasised the importance for good relations between ethnic
minorities and the rest of the population of more e¡ective measures to end
discrimination in employment. But it also pressed for measures for the
bene¢t of ethnic minorities that cannot be squared with the basic ethical
demand for people to be treated equally regardless of race. Thus, for
example, the Report argues that information about waiting lists for medical
treatment within the National Health Service should be collected in a way
that enables them to be compared `by ethnicity and religion' (Parekh 2000,
182). There is nothing wrong with this in itself. The information could be
used as part of an e¡ort to ¢nd out if people from di¡erent ethnic groups
with exactly the same medical condition are waiting on average di¡erent
amounts of time for treatment. If they were, this could clearly be a cause for
concern and for remedial action, since it would violate the proper basis for
treatment, which is that those with the same medical need should receive
the same treatment. However, the Report also makes the much more
questionable claim that `targets should not be colourblind' and that
waiting-list data should be used `to set targets' (Parekh 2000, 182, 183). I
can make sense of this only as a proposal that ethnic groups themselves
should be regarded as morally relevant entities in this context, so that equity
between groups is taken to require equal average waiting times. But I
cannot see any remotely plausible normative basis for making groups rather
than individuals the focus of attention. Surely what matters is that like cases
are treated alike on an individual basis. If this happens to result in di¡erent
average waiting times for di¡erent ethnic groups, that should be no cause
for concern.
Think for a moment about what would be involved in a policy for
hospital admissions that explicitly took religion or ethnicity into con-
sideration in an e¡ort to manipulate waiting times so that the average for
each religion or ethnic group was the same. I ¢nd it hard to imagine a
hospital administrator saying to somebody: `I'm afraid we've already used

112
up the Muslim quota for hip replacements until 2003, but if you'd like to
become a Sikh I could put you down for an operation next month.' Yet this
is the kind of thing that would have to happen if admissions were to be
targeted according to religious or ethnic criteria.
Here is another example of giving ethnicity the wrong sort of treatment.
The Report says that it rejects `colour-blind and culture-blind' approaches
to poverty because of the `spatial distribution' of ethnic groups, in other
words the fact that ethnic groups tend to be clustered in certain towns or
areas of towns (Parekh 2000, 84). But this fact does not show that policies
to deal with poverty ought to be designed in a way that takes account of
ethnic group membership. The Report criticises the notion that anti-poverty
measures need not target groups because, in as far as members of
ethnic groups su¡er from poverty, `they will automatically, and indeed by
de¢nition, bene¢t from anti-poverty measures' (Parekh 2000, 82). But it
gives no good argument against that obvious conclusion.
It is, of course, true, as the Report says, that `poverty a¡ects certain
communities disproportionately' (Parekh 2000, 82). But the implication is
simply that those communities will bene¢t disproportionately (but fairly)
from across-the-board anti-poverty measures. Even more curiously, the
Report says that the trouble with `colour-blind' measures is that `black,
Asian and Irish people will not, of course, bene¢t from measures that target
areas where they do not live' (Parekh 2000, 84). Of course they will not ^ that
is a tautology. But so what? Is the suggestion that poverty su¡ered by people
who are not black, Asian or Irish is not worthy of remedial measures? Is their
poverty somehow less important? That certainly is a formula for discrimin-
ation ^ discrimination against everybody who is poor but not a member of an
ethnic minority. Anti-poverty measures should target poverty wherever it is
and whoever su¡ers from it, which means that some will focus on areas in
which ethnic minorities live and the rest will not.
The kind of discrimination advocated by the Parekh Report has in fact
been carried out in Britain, and it is hardly surprising that it has generated a
powerful sense of injustice among those whose legitimate claims to anti-
poverty bene¢ts have been short-changed. Thus, following the race riots
in the northern industrial town of Oldham in June 2001, The Guardian
reported that there had been a meeting between police, civil leaders and the
Home Secretary at which it was agreed that it had been a mistake to target
funding speci¢cally at Asian areas of the town. The MP for Oldham West
said after the meeting, `It is important that money which had previously
been targeted on particular areas, and which had produced a strong per-
ception of unfairness . . . goes borough wide.' And `a Home O¤ce spokes-
man said this meant funding would be directed ªon the basis of need''
rather than towards geographical areas of the town' (Vasagar 2001). This is
what should have happened all along.

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 More generally, the Report has a strong tendency to move directly from
reporting that ethnic minorities are underrepresented in some occupation
(e.g. as senior decision makers in the mass media) to a presumption that the
cause must be discrimination. There is, unquestionably, discrimination in
Britain. But there are other explanations of underrepresentation: to get to
the top in any business you have to have been in it long enough, and few
¢rst-generation members of ethnic minorities would have brought with
them the necessary quali¢cations to go into editorial jobs in the mass media.
Those born in Britain will mostly be too young to have reached the top even
if they got jobs in the mass media, and in any case they are on average less
well quali¢ed than the rest of the population. This is itself, of course, a
problem, but it is not the problem of occupational discrimination. There is
also, it should hardly need saying, a possibility that some cultures lead their
members to prefer some occupations to others. We should never discount
the alternative possibility that some occupations (e.g. the police and the
army) create a racist atmosphere that discourages recruits and drives out
those who do join. But it would be sheer dogma to deny that there may well
be cultural traits that make some jobs more attractive than others. All of
this, clearly, has implications for the kind of research that needs to be done
to establish the prevalence of discrimination and the kinds of measures that
are needed to deal with it.
Let me draw these remarks to a close by pointing to a theme that runs
through both of my examples. What unites them is that they make the
application of a normative concept turn on questions about choice,
voluntariness and responsibility. (Notice that I regard these three as related
but not identical ideas.) Thus, in the analysis of social exclusion, a crucial
point that has to be settled is how far we want to say somebody is excluded
from an activity even if they don't want to engage in it. Similarly, we have
to ask if someone is subject to discrimination by being a member of a class
of people who would all be denied employment if they sought it, even if that
person would not want the job in question, though quali¢ed for it.
The focus here on the cluster of concepts consisting of choice, volun-
tariness and responsibility is not accidental. The role of these concepts in
the evaluation of institutions has been central to Anglophone political
philosophy for the past twenty years. John Rawls (Rawls 1971) had two
equally implausible formulations. As far as economic productivity was
concerned, Rawls denied personal responsibility completely ^ even the
responsibility to make an e¡ort was, he said, the product of favourable
heredity and environment. But when he turned to the ability to use rights
and resources to pursue our ends, he was equally hardline in the opposite
direction. Here, he suggested that people should be held totally responsible
for their beliefs, tastes and plans of life. They could not therefore complain
if their fair share (independently established) of rights and resources did

114
not get them as far towards their goals as the same share did in the hands
of others. It is bad enough that neither of these propositions seems likely to
be true without quali¢cations. But what is especially unlikely is that they
could both be true at the same time. Admittedly, they have di¡erent subject
matters, but could human beings possibly be so totally bifurcated as this
account implies? Political philosophers have been trying ever since to
come up with a uni¢ed theory that makes sense over the whole range of
phenomena. I do not think we have got there yet, but I do believe some
clarity has been achieved already. I myself hope to contribute to the topic in
the third and last volume of my Treatise on Social Justice, but I have no
expectation of having the last word.

NOTE
1. This was originally presented as an acceptance address upon receipt of the Johan Skytte
Prize in Political Science from the Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University.

REFERENCES
Burchardt, T., Le Grand, J. & Piachaud, D. 1999. `Social Exclusion in Britain 1991^1995',
Social Policy and Administration 33, 227^44.
Hills, J., Le Grand, J. & Piachaud, D., eds. Forthcoming. Understanding Social Exclusion.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parekh, B. 2000. The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. London: Pro¢le Books.
Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vasagar, J. 2001. `Asian Cash Aid to Be Diverted to Whites', The Guardian, 15 June, p. 5.

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