Political Theory and Political Culture

The separation of political theory and political science as distinct academic subdisciplines, assigning to political theory the role of 'moral compass' (Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, Introduction), and remanding empirical investigation to political science, inflates the 'fact/value distinction' to a career choice in the study of politics. This unusual, perhaps unique, form of the division of empirical and theoretical labour has been of questionable intellectual benefit, and it deprives political theory of effective influence on democratic politics itself, notwithstanding its normative 'vocation' (Wolin’s term): each new refinement of normative logic distances it further from the discourse of democracy. This paper attempts to move political theory beyond that impasse by showing that some of its most widely discussed arguments, as well as the recent strand of internal critique known as realism, already contain resources for the escape, provided that the disciplinary aversions and avoidances that separate political theory from political science and other social sciences are overcome. Specifically, it examines the use of the concept of political culture in the work of Rawls, Habermas and Wolin, and in the realist critique. Political culture is a concept with a somewhat fluctuating trajectory within political science, with its first substantial deployment in empirical research, The Civic Culture (1963), receiving significant critical challenges by the 1970s, a pattern which has been recurrent. Yet it entered the political lexicon with sufficient permanence to feature, if somewhat recessively, in the work of both Rawls and Habermas. It also occurs in the now substantial realist literature, though ironically without much advance in specificity or rigour despite realism's critique of political theory's 'abstractness'. Both realism and its targets, then, take the idea of political culture for granted: the aversion to political science runs deep. Political science, for its part, has taken the concept for granted in a different but characteristic way: by moving rather rapidly from conceptualization to operational measurement, leaving important questions unresolved (such as the nature of the 'survey response' on which many studies are based). This paper will promote the reconsolidation of political analysis in part by broadening the resources for conceptualization of political culture beyond political science into sociology and social psychology, but mainly by evaluating the uses made of the idea of political culture in political theory. A key focus will be Wolin's major study of Tocqueville, a work which brings into question the division between political theory and political science that Wolin himself prominently advanced. Democracy in America indeed represents not, as is often claimed (e.g. Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist), a primitive forerunner of the current practice of political science, but a demonstration of what can be achieved when disciplinary boundaries are treated with less reverence than now prevails.