Recovering the political

Abstract

MUCH OF WESTERN POLITICAL THEORY HAS BEEN PREDICATED UPON WHAT now can be recognized as an ungrounded teleological assumption. Thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx have relied, explicitly or implicitly, on the belief that there is some set of political and social arrangements most conducive to the maximization of human wellbeing and happiness. With the discovery and installation of these arrangements, each individual member of society would be able to experience the freedom, community, social harmony, material well-being, and opportunities for self-realization that are inscribed as possibilities or teloi upon the human condition. The enterprise of political theory thus became a struggle to craft an ideal blueprint for achieving such a society, the practical possibility of which is vouchsafed by some additional hypotheses about what a human being is and how the world works. These additional hypotheses are variously expressed in the form of philosophical truth,