Pitkin's Dilemma: The Wider Shores of Political Theory and Political Science

Abstract

Modern political science has created a separation between political theory and empirical political research that impoverishes both sides and is becoming increasingly outdated. I suggest that the work of Michel Foucault is profitably understood in the context of American social and political science, including the empirical research of Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and Thomas Schelling, and that the social theorists’ work is better appreciated within Foucault’s rigorous philosophical framework. Foucault’s use of an open “game” context converges with the positions of both Wittgenstein and Schelling to suggest a theory that provides insights into the nontyrannical theory Pitkin sought. It also opens prospects for a theoretically integrated agenda for empirical and normative political research. The Problem of Political Theory Thirty years ago, in the conclusion to her study of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s significance for political philosophy, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin posed a dilemma arising from Wittgenstein’s transformation of the philosophical method and the impact of this change on traditional political theory. Pitkin argued that traditional political theory had been inherently tyrannical. Plato solved the political problem “by eliminating politics” and theorized justice “by eliminating the need for, and thus the real nature of ” justice. But leaving aside Plato, often criticized for totalitarian tendencies, 1 Pitkin found that even Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, both committed to the concept of human liberation, followed the same pattern: “[T]here seems to be something in the enterprise of theorizing itself that makes the resulting system seem totalitarian and in that sense nonpolitical. The theorist stands outside the political system about which he speculates and writes; of necessity he deploys and manipulates its citizens without considering their wishes or opinions.” 2 Attempting to create intellectual order, the theo