Reason, Meaning, and History: A Critique of the Foundations of Political Thought

Addresses the twin questions of how we should theorize civil association and why we need to be doing so.

In Reason, Meaning, and History author Craig L. Carr advances a series of interrelated claims. First, historically, political thinking once exhibited a commitment to normative rationalism (or what John Pocock has called the "natural law tradition"), or to the view that reason can discern fundamental (and objective) laws of human association, and the objective of political theory is to identify and articulate these laws. Second, this belief in the power of reason fell into disrepute in the early part of the twentieth century as a result of the rejection of naturalistic ethics and the turn toward social science. This turn saw the decline of political theory. Third, the latter part of the twentieth century saw the rebirth of political theory, but this came with a turn toward different, and competing, foundational postulates that introduced different, and again competing, approaches to the field. Fourth, these disparate approaches, the argument goes, can be organized into three basic intellectual orientations discernible by noticing their central postulates. Finally, a critical examination of these three orientations provides reason to think that one is preferable to the other two when it comes to thinking about how best to pursue the traditional concerns of political theory. The orientation defended as the final claim of the work is identified as the "meaning-based" tradition, or what is perhaps better known as the analytic tradition of political inquiry.