ABSTRACT

It is a commonplace that political philosophy was reborn in 1971. In the interwar period, and then again for a quarter of a century after the Second World War, we are told, scepticism about the subject itself had inhibited any treatment of its fundamental questions that was systematic and comprehensive and, above all, that issued in rationally compelling principles for the evaluation of political institutions and the guidance of political conduct. The climate of opinion in general philosophy – as expressed in positivist accounts of meaning, emotivism in moral theory and the broader influence of the ordinary language philosophies – seemed to have rendered hopeless the projects of political philosophers working in an older and grander tradition that encompassed Aristotle and John Stuart Mill. It seemed to suggest that the most that could reasonably be hoped for was a succession of exercises in ‘the analysis of concepts’ – that is to say, armchair investigations of recent and local uses of words which derived whatever interest or authority they possessed

from an appeal to the linguistic and moral intuitions, not of the words’ users, but of philosophers in their armchairs – of the sort undertaken in 1965 in Brian Barry’s Political Argument.1