Political Theory, History of

Bjorn Wittrock, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
Ó 2001 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 17, pp. 11706–11712, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

Historically, the focus of political thought has been on a triad of related problems, namely those of constituting a community
bound by a normative order, of establishing the legitmacy and terms of enforcement of such an order, and of articulating
criteria for allocations of resources and entitlements. In early modern Europe political thought was largely concerned with the
nature and legitimacy of new forms of normatively binding orders and their terms of enforcement. The concern with the
constitution of political community became the central one in political thought from Hobbes and Pufendorf over Locke all
the way to Rousseau. The intellectual transformation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries entailed a shift in
the thinking about human beings, about society, and about the very nature of political order. The end of World War I and the
interwar years marked the triumph and crisis of liberal political thought and the emergence of a range of forms of political
thought that transcended liberal traditions. The history of political thought towards the end of the twentieth century has been
characterized by efforts to reconceptualize the nature human agency, whether in a rationalistic-deliberative form or in
a linguistic-interpretative form. The first stream of research has led to formulations of the nature of political community in
contractual terms. It has also sought to establish normative criteria for the proper allocation of resources. The second stream
has resulted in programs for the writing of conceptual and contextual intellectual histories. It has also involved efforts to
position political thought in a wider global context.

Reflection about political phenomena in a wide sense of the
term is as old as human community itself. It focuses on a triad
of related problems that might be broadly delimited as follows.
First, there is the problem of constituting a community bound
together by a normative order, secondly that of establishing the
legitimacy and the terms of enforcement of such an order, and,
thirdly, that of finding criteria for a proper and just allocation
of resources as well as of entitlements. Jointly these three sets of
problems entail that political theory and the history of political
theory, as distinct from, say, a theory of scientific validation or
a theory of argumentation, will be characterized by an inherent
duality. Thus it will not only, as these other types of theory, be
an account of rules of contestation and signification. It will also
have to involve an account of which such rules are and which
are not upheld by a normativity that is, in the last instance,
enforceable by violent means. Put in everyday language,
political theory will in its core be a theory both about meaning
and communication and a theory about power, enforcement,
and, ultimately, violence. It is easy to see that different political
theorists have come to emphasize different strands in this
duality, but the duality itself is irreducible and constitutive of
political thought.
Afro-Eurasia in the last centuries of the first millennium BCE
also gave rise to a range of texts about the nature of political
order. This is equally valid for texts about the Roman and
Byzantine empires in the Mediterranean region to texts high-
lighting features of rulership in Parthian and later also
in Sassanian Persia, in Maurya India, and in the Han Empire
of China.
The recording of political thought in the form of the writing
of histories of such thought is however a much more recent
phenomenon. At its focus it is the relationship of community-
wide rules to forms of enforcement and an effort to arrive at an
understanding of the historical context in which particular
types of such relationships occur. The emergence of clearly
articulated forms of historical thought is largely coterminous
with the emergence of history and social science as forms of
scholarly activity performed within reformed or newly created
universities and higher education institutions from the early
nineteenth century onwards. In order to understand the key
features and characteristics of the writing of histories of polit-
ical thought it is first of all necessary to bring out key conditions
of political thought in the region in which such an early
disciplinary condition first occurred, namely in Europe.

Political Thought in Historical Context Political Thought and Early Modernities

Thought about such matters is found in clearly articulated form
from the middle of the first millennium BCE onwards in all the
major civilizations of Afro-Eurasia. Thus it is manifested in
written texts in the sixth century by Confucius and two centu-
ries later by Mencius, in China and the writings during the same
period in India, as well as in the prophetical age of Jewish
religion and during the era of classical philosophy in Greece.
The emergence of imperial-like political orders across
In a broad sense political thought in early modern Europe was
a way to understand the nature of ruling in human commu-
nities and to grasp the conditions of normative argumentation
and enforcement in such communities. The need for new
understandings of these types of phenomena was itself directly
related to the gradual decline and eventual demise of the two
most prominent institutional forms of medieval Europe. Those
were, first, the cultural world of Western Christendom,

480 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 18 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03043-9

epitomized first by the all-embracing Christian Church and
second by its secular counterpart, namely the pervasive, but
elusive, political order of the Holy Roman Empire. By the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, city republican rule,
particularly in the northern half of Italy, had emerged as a new
form of political order. Originally it was often modeled on
trading communities and was created out of a sense of the
necessity of mutual support and protection in areas exposed to
incursions and with little or no protection provided by the
nominal Imperial rulers.
Similarly, incipient national monarchies were starting to
assert their authority vis-à-vis both pope and emperor. In this
secular process the French king played a pioneering role. In
particular, he had earlier than most other kings and rulers
demonstrated his ability to strengthen his own position and
financial basis, e.g., by confiscating lands and goods of the
order of the Templars. This example was to be followed by
kings across Europe in their confiscating the lands and riches of
monasteries and religious orders in centuries to come.
In this sense, the Reformation and the Counterreformation
meant that in Protestant and Catholic countries alike, national
monarchies, normally of a composite nature (cf. Elliott, 1992),
were created or reformed. This occurred on the basis of the
previous dominant ideals of church, empire, and city republics,
but in a form that synthesized parts that had previously been
separated. Furthermore, the new national and composite
monarchies almost invariably involved efforts on the part of
rulers to appropriate lands and resources that had previously
been controlled by the church or religious orders. Thereby they
were also able to secure a fiscal basis for the new forms of
political ruling, if often at a horrendous price of protracted
religious civil wars and cleansings.
Under these conditions the pre-eminent political questions
became that of grasping the nature and legitimacy of
a normatively binding communal order and to outline the
range of legitimate means for upholding and enforcing that
order. Many of the early modern classical political thinkers,
from Machiavelli to Jean Bodin, provide answers to these very
questions. They have, however, significantly less to say about
the two other sets of questions discerned above and that were
to become prominent in later political thought. These were the
questions of the very constitution of a community of human
beings and of the principles underlying decisions about
the allocations of resources or the granting or withholding
of entitlements.
All this was to change with the final breakdown of the old
political and cultural order in Europe in the middle of the
seventeenth century. In China, even in the embattled transition
from the Ming to the Ching dynasty at roughly the same time,
the general linguistic and political order was preserved. In
Japan a long period of internal warfare and turmoil came to an
end with the establishment of one of the most effective forms
of absolutist rule, namely the Tokugawa shogunate. Across the
Islamic world, the three parallel empires of the Ottomans, the
Safavi, and the Mughals, constituted stable political entities. In
Europe, however, a new system of states took form and was
promulgated in the Westphalian peace treaty of 1648, based on
an explicit recognition of religious diversity and monarchical
pre-eminence. It was also based on the tacit recognition that an
all-encompassing imperial polity was no longer even possible
Political Theory, History of 481
as a viable political ideal and that religious diversity was not to
be overcome.
Political Thought as the Constitution of a Political
Community
In this unfamiliar context, there was an urgency about finding
ways of granting legitimacy and meaning to the new order that
emerged in the wake of the Westphalian peace treaty and the
provisional end of a century and a half of bloody civil wars in
Europe. Thereby a sea change occurred in political thought,
namely a deep-seated shift from a concern with the enforce-
ment of normative political order to a concern with the nature
and very emergence of political community in the first place.
The concern with the constitution of political community
becomes the central one in political thought from Hobbes and
Pufendorf to Locke all the way to Rousseau. Within this wide
range of answers there is, however, a recurring and predomi-
nant concept, namely an inquiry into the conditions for the
establishment of a social contract. The existence of such a social
contract was normally seen also to entail an answer to the
question of which types of enforcement of the normative order
constitutive of the political community are legitimate. More
specifically only those types of enforcement are sanctioned
that, implicitly or explicitly, follow from the terms of the social
contract itself.
Political theory from Hobbes onwards is centrally preoc-
cupied with the nature of and the consequences of a transition
from an imaginary state of nature to the contractually consti-
tuted political community. Ultimately all such forms of theo-
rizing seem to depend on a limited set of assumptions about
human beings and the nature of their joining together in
societies. One such set of assumptions refer to the assignment
of some kind of human rights, i.e., rights that accrue to human
beings irrespective of their origins and other accidental traits
and characteristics. Furthermore, there is a set of assumptions
that refer to the thought-experiment of society being created
through a process, normally described in terms of a contract,
whereby human beings agree about their association in polit-
ical form.
Questions about enforcement, separate from an answer to
the question of the constitution of a political order, based upon
legitimately agreed upon contractual arrangements, were of
subordinate and derivative importance relative to this over-
riding concern. The same is true of questions pertaining to the
allocation of resources and the assignment of entitlements to
the members and subjects of a political community. Thus such
matters have to be dealt with and negotiated in accordance
with the terms of those agreed upon in the original contractual
arrangements.
Thus European political theory in this classical form
emerged in a particular historical context both in European and
world history. It also involved forms of theorizing that por-
trayed an imaginary contractual past as the point of constitu-
tion of polities. However, it was not in itself characterized by an
effort to reflect on the history of political theory as a key
component of developing such a theory. This form of reflexive
consciousness was to become a key characteristic of yet another
major transformation in intellectual and political history.
482 Political Theory, History of
The Formation of Modernity and the Transition from
Political Philosophy to Social Science and History
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are often
described in terms of the coterminous occurrence of major
transformations of both technological and economic practices
and of political order. Often these transformations are captured
with terms such as the industrial revolution and the political
transformations inherent in the French and American revolu-
tions. However, in this period there also occurs a major
restructuring of ideas about nature and society and, more
broadly, in the forms of knowledge and beliefs about the
world. This intellectual transformation had deep repercussions
for the emergence of new forms of political thought and
reflection about the historical context of such forms of thought
and for the decline of other forms of political thought.
In this period broad genres of thought about the world
gradually gave way to more differentiated forms of knowledge.
Slowly natural philosophy and political philosophy came to be
replaced by a variety of different natural and social sciences. At
the core of this transformation were epistemic shifts where
ideas about biological and historical processes, about language
and interpretation, about human beings and their capacities
and bonds were created or reformulated. Some scholars have
even spoken of this period as a second scientific revolution,
where modern disciplines emerge in rudimentary form and
where there is a shift in the institutional locations of scholarly
and scientific activities toward new research laboratories and
universities. In this process, society itself may even, to quote
one scholar (Manent, 1994, pp. 80–83), be said to have been
discovered in its modern form, as distinct from the political
order of the prerevolutionary period, whether it had the form
of an absolutist monarchy or a constitutional one. Contrary to
older forms of contractual reasoning, which postulated social
contract as the hypothetical medium that had created political
order, the new forms of social thought were distinctly historical
and could also draw on anthropological experiences of
human beings and societies in different parts of the world (Fox
et al., 1995).
Broadly speaking, four distinct forms of thinking about
human beings, societies, and political order emerged. These
new forms of reasoning and the transition from generalized
moral and political philosophy to social sciences had deep
repercussions for political thought.
First, there was, with roots in the political economy and
moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, a view of
human beings as rational and deliberative individuals and of
society as a compositional collective. This also made possible
a new way of thinking about political community and its
legitimacy. More precisely, it provided the possibility for
thinking about political order as formed through the consent of
individual human beings. However it was not, as in older
contractual thinking, a consent that would have ushered in
a distant and hypothetical social contract but rather a consent
that could be assessed and rationally evaluated in terms of its
reasonableness in its present and historical context.
Second, there emerged, often enough out of the experiences
of the relative inability of the French Revolution to create stable
institutions, a conception of human agency as formed and
constrained by structural and systemic properties and of society
as an organic totality. Such a conception would in a conserva-
tive version lead to theories of the necessity to restore an
organic political order. In a radical version it could, however,
also usher in demands for the overthrow of unnatural and
illegitimate order. In a more broadly defined liberal or repub-
lican tradition, it might and would be compatible with ideas of
the type that thinkers, often inspired by Durkheim, would
propound toward the end of the nineteenth century in their
combat against the ideological enemies of the republic. Thus it
could support the idea that modern society was not an atom-
istic and distorted form of human community but could relate
to an organic solidarity compatible with the life of free citizens
in a free republic.
Third, and often in relation to historical and linguistic
thought among representative of German philosophical
idealism, a conceptualization of human beings took form in
terms of the linguistic-interpretative nature of human agency
and of society as an historically emergent totality. In this sense,
political community did not have to derive its legitimacy from
dynastic tradition but from the historically grown experience of
a community. Such communities in turn were constituted by
human beings sharing a language and a history and where the
community of shared life forms was seen as deeper, more
genuine, and more real than the artificial boundaries of
a minor princely state. It is easy to see that demands for
national self-determination and for both popular rule and
a nation-state easily flow from a conception along these lines.
Finally, in parallel to the dramatic development of forms of
statistical analysis, there emerged a statistical-inductive way of
representing the interactions of human beings and of society as
a kind of systematized aggregate. Such views did not immedi-
ately entail a specific form of legitimate political community,
but it would mean that any such community would have at its
disposal infinitely more detailed knowledge of the polity
and its members than even the most absolutist monarchy
(cf. Brian, 1994).
Thus the great intellectual transition entailed a deep shift in
the history of political thought which affected both concep-
tions of the nature of a political community and the nature of
legitimate and illegitimate enforcement. By virtue of this it also
had profound implications for conceptions of the proper
distribution of entitlements. Thus it was simply no longer
possible, as observed most clearly perhaps by Tocqueville
(1964, [1850]), to deny demands for popular participation
with reference to tradition or dynastic legitimacy. The thought
of a right to the political entitlements belonging to all members
of a society, that had been manifested in the proclamations of
the revolutionary upheavals, could never again, despite all
efforts of the Vienna Congress and the Holy Alliance, be
unthought. They were to pervade the political struggles first of
European and American societies throughout the nineteenth
and the early twentieth centuries and eventually in the world
at large.
Triumph and Crisis of Liberal Political Thought
The end of World War I marked a sea change in world history. It
spelt the end of European global pre-eminence. It also meant
that the transition in Western Europe, normally from forms of

constitutional monarchical rule, to parliamentary democratic
rule was dramatically increased. In the Eastern half of Europe
all of the four imperial political entities, the Russian, the
Habsburg, the Wilhelminian, and the Ottoman, crumbled
under the impact of external military defeat and internal
revolutionary upheavals. However, the very triumph of liberal
principles of representative democracy was coterminous with
the emergence of new forms of political thought that tran-
scended the traditions of the prewar world.
Leninist political thought, which before and during the war
had been a radical version of classical Marxism, gradually came
to take on the features of an official ideology of the new Soviet
state. Precisely in its historical imaginary, Leninism differed
from both revisionist and orthodox thought in a Marxist
tradition, as epitomized by Bernstein and Kautsky respectively,
of the Social Democratic mainstream of the Second Interna-
tional in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus
Leninism cast its own claims to legitimacy and its right to use
forms of violent enforcement, previously unthought of in late
nineteenth century socialist thought, in terms of an historical
account and of a projected visionary transition to a stateless
society of communism.
Experiences of the mass violence of the war itself, as well as
of the violent national and social struggles of the immediate
postwar period, formed the environment out of which fascism
emerged as a violent rejection of both Marxism and of the
whole mainstream tradition of liberal political thought. Even if
fascism had roots in prewar forms of radical conservative
thought, it marked a form of transcendence of such traditions
and indeed of the legacy of modernity itself. Thus even if
fascism in power, and its radicalized form of National
Socialism, embraced technological modernization, it repre-
sented a rejection of basic premises of political thought of
modernity in the form it had taken since the late eighteenth
century. In particular this is true of the basic presupposition of
political thought of modernity of a principled equal right to
participation in governance. It is also true of fascism’s rejection
of another basic presupposition of modernity, namely the
legitimacy of a public sphere with free access for all and
a principled freedom of every member of a polity to speak not
only about but also to the rulers.
In a sense fascist political thought was a form of political
thought that invoked history, or rather historical mythology.
However, it was not in itself characterized by historical reflec-
tion. In Germany, the challenge of fascism to the political order
of the Weimar republic was manifested in a range of debates,
one of the most important of which concerned the nature of
legal order and of the state itself. It was in this debate that the
contesting positions of the radical and pro-Nazi decisionism
of Carl Schmitt was confronted by the legal positivism of
Hans Kelsen and the complex and sophisticated thought of
Hermann Heller.
The outlines of a radical rethinking of the history of Western
philosophical and political thought can be discerned in the
elective affinity between fascism and some forms of philo-
sophical thought, in particular that of Heidegger of the late
1920s and early 1930s. However, such a program was never
elaborated or extended, nor was the decisive response and
resistance to it on the part of a thinker such as Ernst Cassirer.
Instead the military defeat of fascism in World War II was seen
Political Theory, History of 483
to entail the definitive demise of features of political thought
characteristic of fascism.
In the French context, the response to the challenges of
fascism was to be found in several quarters. These would range,
in political terms, from Marxism to radical Catholic political
thought, and in scholarly terms, from sociology in the tradition
of Durkheim to the profound renewal of historical studies of
the Annales School. In the period after World War II, the French
intellectual scene may have been the most important one in
Europe in terms of a renewal of political thought. Thus it would
comprise the nexus of contributions made by scholars elabo-
rating a Marxian philosophical existentialist position, most
importantly of course Sartre, but also thinkers such as Claude
Lefort, who, starting out from such a position came to question
the core of Leninist political thought. It would also comprise
some of the most articulated liberal political thought as epit-
omized by Raymond Aron.
In the interwar years, the new challenges to liberal
political thought had already given rise to a profound
renewal of political thought in historical context. These were
the years when new standard histories of political thought
were being written. The most prominent example in the
Anglo-Saxon world might have been a book that was to
become a classic for generations, namely George Sabine’s
(1937) majestic volume A History of Political Theory.
Refugees from continental Europe made key contributions to
this debate. A classical example is the analysis of the meaning
of democracy in historical context that was articulated by
Joseph Schumpeter (1943) in Capitalism, Socialism, and
Democracy. Most importantly, perhaps, Karl Popper tran-
scended the bounds of philosophy of science and wrote one
of the most quoted works in political thought during the
twentieth century in his two-volume opus on The Open
Society and Its Enemies (Popper, 1966, [1945]). This was, of
course, a work that was pre-eminently characterized by the
links between historical analysis and political philosophy of
immediate and contemporary relevance.
In parallel, leading representatives of Scandinavian political
and legal science made some pathbreaking contributions both
to an understanding of fascism and of the nature of democracy.
In this respect the names of Herbert Tingsten and Alf Ross stand
out, particularly with Tingsten’s pioneering studies of fascism
and his and Ross’s contributions to a political theory of
democracy.
One prominent characteristic of antiliberal political
thought of the first half of the twentieth century was its
emphasis on the right of the polity to resort to enforcement and
violence against the enemies of the polity without being bound
by any other constraints than those of pure convenience. Thus
the constitutive boundary between members and enemies of
the political community, between those chosen to fulfill the
destiny of that community and those deemed to stand in the
way and worthy of being removed from community, and
ultimately from life, became the most crucial one. The political
community itself was seen as constituted in terms of a historical
account, whether of the struggle of a class for its liberation
against oppression or of a people for its legitimate sphere of life
and domination. Resistance to such types of political thought
of a historicist nature formed the core of the argument of
Popper’s political philosophy. It also formed the focus for
484 Political Theory, History of
a range of contributions criticizing totalitarian political
thought. Among the main contributors to this critique were
thinkers as different as Jacob L. Talmon, Hannah Arendt, and
Claude Lefort.
Renewal and Critique in Political Thought
The history of political thought in the first part of the latter half
of the twentieth century is characterized by three parallel
developments. First, political thought in this period cannot but
reflect the deep tensions in a world with two superpowers in
a state of cold war. At the same time large parts of the Third
World were emerging out of the experiences of a colonial past
and seeking a place in this new world of fundamental tensions.
One manifestation of this historical context, was the absolute
absence of publications in the tradition of liberal political
thought in the countries under Soviet dominance, but also the
relative absence of Marxist political thought at many universi-
ties in the English-speaking world. Another indirect conse-
quence was a persistent interest in exploring the empirical basis
of liberal democracy. In this sense, the contributions by
scholars such as Robert Dahl and some of his colleagues at Yale
university, not least Charles Lindblom, stand out as exemplary.
Second, a classical mainstream tradition of historically orien-
tated political philosophy made significant advances. Isaiah
Berlin and Judith Shklar are pre-eminent representatives of this
type of scholarship, and the works of Charles Taylor and
Norberto Bobbio should also be included here. Third, however,
philosophical and theoretical contributions were made that
were to reshape the history of late twentieth century political
thought. I shall highlight some of these contributions and their
consequences in terms of two of the major conceptualizations
of human agency and of society that were discerned in the
section above about the rise of the social sciences at the turn of
the eighteenth century.
In a rationalistic-deliberative tradition, a landmark was
established by the publication of Kenneth Arrow’s (1951)
Social Choice and Individual Values. A few years later, economic
theorizing would enter political science at large with Anthony
Downs’s (1957) book An Economic Theory of Democracy, to be
followed in the early 1960s by a range of books applying game
theory and social choice theory to political phenomena.
(Incidentally, as testified by Gabriel Almond (1990, p.117) the
institutional role of the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences at Stanford was a crucial one for some of
the interactions involving Arrow, Dahl, and others. These
interactions were of immediate importance to the very publi-
cation of Downs’s book but also more generally to the break-
through of rationalistic forms of analysis).
A few decades later, what had once appeared as an inter-
esting but rather marginal concern of some specialized polit-
ical theorists had evolved into a broad tradition of rational
choice analysis with pervasive influence on both the theory
and practice of political thought, particularly in North Amer-
ica. Society as a compositional collective was described not
just as an analytically convenient metaphor but as a represen-
tation of societal order and with consequential claims con-
cerning the nature of legitimate political action. One thrust of
theorizing in this tradition was to demonstrate the limitations,
or even the impossibility, of delimiting an unambiguous
common good, whether arrived at with the help of a social
welfare function or of a majority decision. It is in this context
that John Rawls’s (1971) A Theory of Justice appeared as
a pathbreaking book. Drawing on an individualistic and
contractual form of reasoning, succinctly criticised by several
scholars, most notably perhaps Michael Sandel, Rawls was
able to reintroduce discussions of justice and just distributions
and allocations into the core of political philosophy. Even
after decades of discussions and critique, both Arrow’s and
Rawls’s contribution retain their stature. However, both of
them signal a rupture with historical and contextual reasoning
rather than the opposite.
In the broad tradition of linguistic-interpretative concep-
tions of human action and of society as a form of emergent
totality in historical context, important new developments also
occurred. Thus contributions by continental European
phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophers in the 1950s
and 1960s came to merge with influences from Anglo-Saxon
linguistic philosophy in the tradition of Wittgenstein and
Austin. Three forms of such thought, in particular, emerged and
have exerted a deep influence on the ways of studying the
history of political thought.
In 1959, Reinhart Koselleck (1988, [1959]), drawing on
a tradition of hermeneutic and historical scholarship, pub-
lished a book on critique and crisis. This book had the deep
transformation of intellectual and political order at the turn of
the eighteenth century as its focus but also contained the core
of a research program on the history of key concepts of society
and political order in a long-term perspective. This program
was realized through the publication during the following
decades of a set of nine massive volumes tracing the history of
a limited number of such concepts, primarily in continental
Europe.
Roughly at the same time, Jürgen Habermas elaborated
another research program, drawing on the joint traditions of
critical Marxist thought, hermeneutics, and speech act theory.
In 1962 Habermas published a volume that had an analogous
empirical focus as that of Koselleck (Habermas, 1989). Thus it
was a reinterpretation of the emergence of a new type of
public sphere in the late eighteenth century. Habermas’s
subsequent long-term program has consistently linked these
different traditions and may in one sense be seen as a form of
historical positioning but also a radical generalization of the
philosophical insights of linguistic philosophy and speech
act theory.
This later tradition also inspired Quentin Skinner’s (1978)
two volume major opus The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought (a work, incidentally, written largely at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton). Skinner came to be the major
representative of a new school, often identified with his – and
John Pocock’s old – university, namely Cambridge. It involved
the setting of new and significantly more rigorous standards for
the writing of the history of political thought, particularly in its
demand that the linguistic and intellectual context of the actual
writing of major works be carefully brought to the fore of
analysis. After decades of discussions, there can be little doubt
that intellectual history has made advances in this period,
inspired by the works of Skinner and several of his colleagues,
that still by no means have been fully explored. At the same

time, it is also clear that these works still leave room for a more
extensive inquiry into the relationship between long-term
institutional and intellectual change.
Finally, links between political thought and political agency
are prominent in studies of mechanisms of inclusion and
exclusion and on the granting and withholding of entitlements
for human beings. Gender studies has clearly entailed
a renaissance of the writing of the history of political thought
with pioneering contributions by Carole Pateman and Seyla
Benhabib, just to mention two of the most distinguished
scholars on the late twentieth century.
Historically orientated scholarship has in recent years
seemed to open up the possibility for situating political
thought in a much more encompassing context than has
hitherto been customary. Not least, scholars writing in coun-
tries outside of the North Atlantic and West European context
seem now to be about to help bring about a more truly global
effort to rethink the history of political thought. That would
also, almost inevitably, contribute to a transcendence of some
of the most severe limitations of contemporary political
thought, in particular the following ones:
The relative inability of political thought in the rationalistic tradition
to transcend a theory of agency that is manifestly impoverished vis-à-
vis available historical research but also vis-à-vis demands that social
and political thought itself cannot but make concerning a theory of
agency.
(cf. Joas, 1996, 2000)
The relative inability of the so-called communitarian critics of this
tradition to supply a sustained historical account of their preferred
community and to escape a tendency of entering into circular
justifications of those very societies which they themselves happened
to be located or identified with.
The relative inability of research in the traditions of conceptual
history and linguistic contextualism to contribute to an under-
standing of the institutional formation of political order in a long-
term and also extra-European perspective.
In order to be able to advance beyond these limitations, it
seems that political thought must become significantly more
prepared to engage in studies of long-term processes of intel-
lectual and institutional transformations. This will in all like-
lihood entail efforts to invigorate historical social science of
a type that was characteristic of the classics of social science, not
least Weber (cf. Schluchter, 1996). It would then also stimulate
culturally and contextually sensitive social science of a type that
has been advocated most ambitiously and consistently by
scholars across a range of the social and historical sciences and
with S. N. Eisenstadt (1995) as one of its most prominent
representatives. The history of political thought in the last three
decades of the twentieth century involved impressive advances.
At the turn of the millennium, however, the need for histori-
cally and comparatively orientated research programs able to
transcend the limitations of contemporary political thought
Political Theory, History of 485
also stand out as possibly more urgent than at any time since
the emergence of social science itself in the end of the eigh-
teenth century.
See also: Democratic Theory; Enlightenment; Field Theory;
Hermeneutics, History of; Integration, Social; Intellectual
History; National Socialism and Fascism; Scientific Disciplines,
History of; Solidarity: History of the Concept.
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