Introduction

Abstract

This book pivots on the issues of the character, status, and role of academic political theory. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, these matters continue to be significant not only for the practice of this subfield of political science and for assessing its place in the discipline but also for thinking about the nature of social scientific inquiry in general. I reject the assumption that political theory is sui generis. Political theory as a specific academic field was an invention of American political science, and many of the issues that are endemic to political and social science continue to surface most distinctly in the literature of political theory. The past and future of political theory are inextricably linked to those of the social sciences as a whole, and in turn, these disciplines must be understood and judged more broadly as species of what I refer to as metapractices. The latter are, most simply stated, those practices of knowledge that are defined by the fact that they speak about, and to, other human practices.

This sort of investigation is immensely important and very much against the grain of some of you.

—Wittgenstein