ABSTRACT
Because of the critical nature of his work on the discipline of political theory, John Gunnell’s influence on political theorists is difficult to describe, much less measure. A number of political theorists trained in the 1970s have mentioned that his scholarship was an influence on their writing and their very reason for pursuing a career in political theory. The work they often hold up for special praise is Political Philosophy and Time (1968), his first book. This was based on his doctoral dissertation and represents what must be described as his most romantic work. Ghita Ionescu, for example, regarded Gunnell’s study of Plato and the emergence of a new temporal order wherein humans, for the first time, questioned their relation to the larger cosmic order, as a work that signaled – along with works by Brian Barry and John Rawls – a new maturity in political thought.1 This is typical of the praise for that study. But Gunnell’s reputation in political theory is not as a Plato scholar,
though he is one. Rather, his reputation is based largely on his writings in political and social inquiry, historiography, the genealogy of theory generally and political theory in particular, and the philosophy of science and social science. These studies form the basis of larger claims by Gunnell pertaining to the relations of political theory to political science and the relation of these modes of inquiry to political reality. His writings engage critically the work of his contemporaries in order to examine the status of various elitist claims to special insight, epistemic authority, and privileged knowledge and to expose any category errors such as those that take the form of mistaking a secondorder mode of inquiry, like political science, for a first-order mode, like natural science, or those that manifest the mistaken belief that one is talking about politics when really talking about a philosophical or social scientific model of political reality.2
