A Cognitivist Program for Normative Political Theory

Abstract

THE CONCERN WITH NORMATIVE PROBLEMS in political theory is in one sense a very old one but in another sense a peculiarly contemporary one. The works of classical political theorists are largely normative in character. They concern themselves with what ought to be done in politics. However, most works in traditional political philosophy also contain numerous empirical claims about the nature of politics and society. They only rarely include explicit discussion of the nature of normative discourse about political matters; indeed it is sometimes difficult to separate empirical claims from normative arguments in the classical literature of political theory. Contemporary political theorists, on the other hand, typically concern themselves with an attempt to construct empirical theories about politics which presumably contain no normative assumptions and have no immediate outcome in terms of recommendations as to what ought to be done. This positivist trend in political science and political theory, while it undoubtedly has some precedents in classical political theory, is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon and can probably be said to have obtained dominance in political science in the period following World War I.1 It is what I think can be appropriately