ABSTRACT
Political theory is an art and craft that cultivates and employs critical thinking and practical judgment. The chapter distinguishes political theory from scientific theory while underlining their shared concern for parsimony, accuracy and significance. The discipline’s interpretive, intersubjective, normative, conceptual and historical nature is explored, as well as its fraught relationship with ideology. In turn, the chapter introduces the notion of irony, a kind of skeptical reserve that serves political theorists as a countervailing force to ideology.
