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The methodology of political theory

Book · March 2016

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Christian List
Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich
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 The Methodology of Political Theory
Christian List & Laura Valentini

(forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary

political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After
distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political
science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the
analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and
theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing
such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for
the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent
debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and
assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The
discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of
science. We have chosen this angle with a view to systematizing the
activity of analytic political theorizing so as to make its connections with
other fields of philosophy and positive science more transparent.

For copyright reasons, the full paper is not uploaded on this site. But a
complete preprint of the full paper can be downloaded from:

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/PDF-files/MethodologyPoliticalTheory.pdf

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