Political Theory And Practice: Eight Essays on a Theme

The essays in this monograph address interesting and sometimes puzzling issues arising in the relation of political theorizing to political practice and action "collected" in over two decades of teaching the canonical history of Western political theory. The issues were selected not on some deductive or speculative basis, but for the light they may shed on the political theory - practice relationship by virtue of being controversial and/or puzzling. The issues addressed arise in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Descartes, Locke, Marx, and Michael Oakeshott. A final essay reflects on the general limits to applied political theorizing as well as on its relationship to political rhetoric. The tentative conclusion is advanced that the more one moves from a Greek rationalist-dualist cosmology and ontology in which the existence of something is accidental or incidental to its essence, toward a political viewpoint making increasingly explicit Biblical or creationist and incarnationist cosmological assumptions in which the existence of an idea or pattern adds to its perfection, the more one sees a more or less explicit assumption that the aim of political theorizing is to influence actual political life. Wendell John Coats, Jr. is Professor of Government at Connecticut College.