So you’re just another parochial American who seems to think America rules theory but won’t give us an example.
Who in this thread claimed that "America rules theory"? With every post, your position grows more bizarre.
Who Are the Most Promising Political Theory Profs Today?
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Sod it. We’re up against a parochial American nationalism with which the world is all too familiar in areas far more serious than political theory. The irony is Sanford and Paulene probably think they’re different from Trump. I’m out of here.
No, we’re up against a parochial British nationalism. I’m not an American and I think American political theory is pretty moribund right now, but I don’t wish the world would start copying British norms (which they’re not doing anyway, despite your insinuations otherwise).
Besides your whole position is bizarre. As a non-American I can talk to academics in other countries about American political theory much more easily than trying to talk to them about American political science, which is way more on an island unto itself.
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Pierre Manent (France), Heinrich Meier (Germany, now at UC). Besides, I assume, plenty of careful readers in the UK?
Theory is a dying field in America? You really don’t know the Straussian gang here.
Nobody cares about Strauss at all outside of a few places in America. Straussianism may be the best example of how parochial and irrelevant American PT is.
Oh good. The gradflakes are posting again.
Name 3 prominent straussians outside the US.
Manent
Orwin
MillermanLol I had to google these people. Canada is an appendix of the US. And one of them is a grad student. Face it, Straussianism is a weird parochial fetish.
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OK Paulene, let me try another approach: there are global communities of scholars doing analytic political philosophy, intellectual history, and continental theory. But there is no global community doing the sort of canon-based American PT that is none of the above things. If you don't agree with this observation I don't know on what planet you live.
As numerous posters in this thread have pointed out, your taxonomy makes little sense. Why you keep trying to push it is beyond me.
Do you have an alternative taxonomy that corroborates your position? Do you have an alternative explanation for the decline of theory in American polisci?
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In any subfield but theory it would be incredibly easy to name Americans who did their PhDs in American Political Science Departments and who are now worldwide superstars. Why won’t anyone offer us a few examples from the subfield of theory? Is it because there aren’t any? If you can’t name them, at least own up that American theory isn’t that great.
What the hell is a “worldwide superstar” in political theory these days? The only name I might count is Habermas, who doesn’t fit your taxonomies (actually you could call his recent work a “hybrid approach“).
American theory certainly doesn’t have the big names it used to, but I don’t know of any British theorists dining out around the globe, but if they did it wouldn’t be because they represented some purer approach than American “hybrids”.
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Why is drawing bright lines between analytic, continental, and HPT desirable, rather than intellectually narrow?
Because if you want to know what some canonical figure thought, that's one thing, and if you want to know the correct view about something, that's quite another. One is a historical question, the other a normative question, and as such they are appropriately pursued using entirely different methods.
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What is 'continental' theory? Why is drawing bright lines between analytic, continental, and HPT desirable, rather than intellectually narrow? To my mind, the best UK trained and/or based political theorists do not neatly fit into these paradigms either.
Such as?
Off the top of my head: J. Waldron; J. Tully; A. Phillips; M. Stears; D. Bell; C. Meckstroth; J. Morefield; P. Apostolidis; K. Forrester;
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Why is drawing bright lines between analytic, continental, and HPT desirable, rather than intellectually narrow?
Because if you want to know what some canonical figure thought, that's one thing, and if you want to know the correct view about something, that's quite another. One is a historical question, the other a normative question, and as such they are appropriately pursued using entirely different methods.
So assessing political arguments or concepts ought to be pursued entirely independently of understanding how they've been used historically? At minimum, you should be able to understand that that is not a universally shared methodological premise.
And where does 'continental' fit here? Is it historical or normative?
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Why is drawing bright lines between analytic, continental, and HPT desirable, rather than intellectually narrow?
Because if you want to know what some canonical figure thought, that's one thing, and if you want to know the correct view about something, that's quite another. One is a historical question, the other a normative question, and as such they are appropriately pursued using entirely different methods.
Wait. Do you legitimately believe those lines can be drawn so antiseptically? Seriously??
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Weird list. For starters, Forrester is nowhere near the others. She's a well-connected and overhyped junior, and she does pure Cambridge-style HPT.
Stears and Waldron do analytic. Bell does mostly history.Waldron is also a Locke scholar. Stears has written two books on the history of American political thought.
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Weird list. For starters, Forrester is nowhere near the others. She's a well-connected and overhyped junior, and she does pure Cambridge-style HPT.
Stears and Waldron do analytic. Bell does mostly history.Waldron is also a Locke scholar. Stears has written two books on the history of American political thought.
But they keep these things separate. They don't hide behind canonical authorities to push their normative views.
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Weird list. For starters, Forrester is nowhere near the others. She's a well-connected and overhyped junior, and she does pure Cambridge-style HPT.
Stears and Waldron do analytic. Bell does mostly history.
Waldron is also a Locke scholar. Stears has written two books on the history of American political thought.But they keep these things separate. They don't hide behind canonical authorities to push their normative views.
The first sentence is false, the second sentence is true. The latter is not equivalent to the former. Understanding something about the history of ideas might be important for how these ideas get used and evaluated in the present. Stears has in fact made some interesting contributions to methodological debates in PT on these issues (in a book co-edited with Honig, a US trained and based political theorist with an international profile who blends historical and normative work).
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"Pierre Manent (France), Heinrich Meier (Germany, now at UC). Besides, I assume, plenty of careful readers in the UK?"
"Careful readers"? Is that what you call "reading" Plato's Republic as an extended joke? A sphinx without a secret....
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1985/05/30/sphinx-without-a-secret/
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In any subfield but theory it would be incredibly easy to name Americans who did their PhDs in American Political Science Departments and who are now worldwide superstars. Why won’t anyone offer us a few examples from the subfield of theory? Is it because there aren’t any? If you can’t name them, at least own up that American theory isn’t that great.
It is absolutely asinine to rest one’s position on another’s ability to name famous political theorists who did their graduate work in the US. So, if you insist:
C. MacKinnon (Yale PhD), W. Brown (Princeton PhD), J. Bennett (UMass PhD; I don’t care for her work but it is undeniably influential worldwide), I. Shapiro (Yale PhD; same as Bennett), R. Smith (Harvard PhD), etc.
And, before subfields became formalized: R. Dahl (Yale PhD), S. Wolin (Harvard PhD), J. Shklar (Harvard PhD), I. Kramnick (Harvard PhD), G. Kateb (Columbia PhD), H. Pitkin (Berkeley PhD), W. Connolly (UMich PhD), etc.
The demise of PT in the US is an entirely different question...