Sheldon Wolin, who did so much to give the field of political theory its modern shape, had a distinctive account of its task. Political science in the 1950s was dominated by pluralism and behavioralism and these movements, he believed, had a fissiparous effect on our view of politics. They focused on parts at the expense of the whole. The last page of the first edition of Politics and Vision leaves his readers with an exhortation in the opposite direction: “Citizenship provides … an integrative experience which brings together the multiple role activities of the contemporary person. … [therefore] Political theory must once again be viewed as that form of knowledge which deals with what is general and integrative to men, a life of common involvements.”^{Footnote 1} What sense can we make of this perspective today, at a time when political theory itself has become increasingly pluralistic and when its relation to political science is very different—closer in some respects, with political theorists increasingly involved with contemporary, empirical projects, yet further away in others?

It can be very pleasant, as political theorists, especially for those of us housed in political science departments, to think of ourselves as lonely humanists surrounded by formulaic social scientists whose rigid application of mechanistic models drains all the nuance out of politics—nuance which we, trained so differently, are especially capable of appreciating. I remember feeling a profound sense of satisfaction when I learned, at my first job at the University of Virginia, that political theory classes were the only classes in my department that satisfied the university’s humanities requirement. (And I recall no disappointment at the thought that they did not satisfy the social science requirement.)

There are some good reasons for these feelings. Whatever else political theorists do—and these days they do quite a lot of different things—it is still a core competency of the field to be able to read and interpret difficult texts, a practice that looks a lot like what is done in other fields that are clearly humanistic. Whatever it is called, the craft of interpretation is understood in the study of art and literature to itself be an art that one acquires through practice and exposure to acknowledged masters. When describing ourselves this way, political theorists picture our descent from a tradition of Renaissance scholarship that began, perhaps with Petrarch, himself a poet, the process of recovering, editing, interpreting, and transmitting ancient texts as repositories of human wisdom at a time when such practices were not at all common or traditional.

But as pleasant and self-gratifying as this story is, it is hardly true. American political theory, as a branch of political science, is equally and perhaps more clearly descended from the continental tradition of Staatswissenschaft that dominated German universities in the nineteenth century and the American universities that increasingly imitated them. Jack Gunnell’s excellent history of American political theory—with its tongue-in-cheek Darwinian title The Descent of Political Theory—makes this fact abundantly clear. “Political science,” he writes, “was born with a subfield of political theory, because political theory … had become a conventional aspect of the nineteenth-century university curriculum,” first in Germany and then in the United States through the efforts of German-trained American professors and émigrés such as Francis Lieber.^{Footnote 2}

To this way of thinking, the study of states (or the state) was a science, even if it bore only a slight resemblance to the sort of social science we see in the United States today. It certainly did not exclude the study of ideas. Indeed, since in the Staatswissenschaftlich perspective, states were fundamentally structured by law and law was intimately related to right, it seemed entirely possible to these scholars that there should be a science of law and a science of right to go with it. This was the science that Kant and Hegel, both comfortable as German university professors, thought of themselves as contributing to and that W.E.B. Du Bois was educated in during his time in Berlin. And if figures like Marx and Weber later saw themselves in rebellion against Kant and Hegel’s Idealism, they certainly did not object—and indeed positively insisted—that their own theories met the exacting scientific standards that earlier generations had established.

The interpretation of texts was certainly not alien to this tradition; it was integral especially to the study of law (Lieber himself ended his career at Columbia Law School). But the practice of interpretation was itself understood as something that was at least potentially or incipiently scientific, something that was certainly not a matter of personal taste or style, but rather of a disciplined, professional expertise that could be learned and transmitted in a quasi-formal matter, as it remains, to a degree, in our courts and schools of law today.

Political theory was certainly not the whole of Staatswissenschaft or even the largest part. But since the state was understood as a conceptual ideal (on which the more particular and concrete institutions such as government, party, law and politics were by definition parasitic), an understanding of that ideal, and long-standing debates about it, was a necessary component of any of the more empirical or comparative inquiries that early political science wanted to take on. That is to say, without political theory there could be no political science. Early textbooks and courses of study reflected this close relationship.^{Footnote 3}

So I think an honest look at our history, and even at our own syllabi, reveals that political theory is not simply a humanistic practice misplaced in political science by an accident of history—a fantasy which, I should point out, is as comforting to some of our more statistically-minded colleagues as it is to us (in a different way, of course, in their case—as grounds for exclusion!). What has happened instead is that the bounds of science have been repeatedly moved and narrowed in the last century so that broad theories of the state and the textual interpretation required to understand debates about them are things that many political scientists no longer consciously contemplate as a part of their scientific method—although in practice, of course, they employ both all the time.

Wolin’s complaint, when carefully considered, is in fact primarily about the loss of the state and citizenship as central objects of inquiry—and only secondarily about a loss of familiarity with great texts and their interpretation. He did not defend merely reading great books for their own sake but as part of an integrated form of political inquiry. It is this change in the dominant meaning of political science—rather than political theorists’ rejection of science as such—that accounts for theory’s institutional isolation and the belated identification of political theory as a humanistic activity, something that never occurred in the early history of the field.

Of course, political scientists (and social scientists more generally) are perfectly entitled to change their methods and even their definitions of “science.” No social practice stays the same forever and, for that matter, the hermeneutic practices of political theorists have also evolved, although perhaps not as radically, in the same period. But when the history of these changes is ignored or forgotten (and especially when the current incarnations of science and its methods are reified as their essences), it creates the false impression that political science and political theory are two separate traditions that have been thrown together by happenstance when in fact they are born, not just from the same impulse, but from the same books, individuals, and institutions. If their coherent relationship now seems difficult to perceive, that is as much because their objects of study have altered as because of any necessary conflict in their methods. But objects of study can alter again, as I will later argue they should. As can “science.”

I do not mention all this to scold social scientists for doubting our shared descent, but in fact primarily to stop political theorists from romanticizing their supposed humanist roots.

I do not deny (and have no desire to deny) the humanistic qualities of our methods but at the very least, I think, we have to understand political theory as a practice that tacks back and forth between the winds of the humanities and those of social science, ideally taking energy from both. While I do not think it makes any sense, and it would be misleading, to speak any longer of a “science of interpretation,” still I think it does make sense to understand our diverse activities as a practice that is still in a fundamental relationship with social science, broadly understood, as much as it is with the humanities. Or, more radically, perhaps I could say that political theory is a practice that does not respect the boundaries between the humanities and social science and that there is no good reason for it do so.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method, used the expression “a discipline of questioning” to describe the activity of hermeneutics and I don’t think that is a bad place to start in renovating our thinking about political theory.^{Footnote 4} The phrase captures both the sense of order and structure that Socratic elenchus requires—as well as the open-endedness and curiosity that we find lacking in so much contemporary social science.

To stay with Gadamer for a moment longer: Truth and Method opens with an indictment of our slavish obedience to the structure of inquiry bequeathed to us by Kant’s three Critiques (which, indeed, had a lot to do with the structure of the nineteenth-century German university). Whatever you think of the Critiques, Gadamer says, they solidified the idea that there are three discrete kinds of intellectual inquiry: epistemological, moral and aesthetic—roughly, inquiry into the true, the right (or good) and the beautiful—and that these are distinct activities with distinct methods, means and objects (different “conditions of possibility” in the Kantian argot). Right or wrong (and from Gadamer’s perspective, it’s both) the practical effect of this division was to inspire and perpetuate a deepening of internal boundaries within the academy.^{Footnote 5}

The worst part of this, from his perspective, was the way that the tripartite dissection isolates art, and the humanities in general, from moral philosophy and social science. To say that art and literature are not, in the first place, about what is true or what is good or what is just—to say that is to profoundly diminish their significance and to misunderstand both the purposes of their creators and their place in human social life. It is to create lines in the sand between elements of the human experience that should be understood as fundamentally related. Insofar as humanities scholars accepted this division (and they did for a long time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even if they mostly don’t any longer) they also withdrew—as our political science colleagues did—from the terrain that overlapped with political theory and social science more generally. This constrained vision of the humanities is just as damaging, in its own way, as a constrained version of science, to our understanding of political theory and debates about its role.

What I am trying to say in all this is that rather than trying too hard to locate political theory somewhere between the humanities and the social sciences (which ends up making it slightly alien to both), we should instead spend our time trying to run back together the whole fields that Kant wrongly put asunder. And if we did that we would find political theory not on the margins of two or three departments (philosophy, history, political science) but rather right in the middle of everything, as it should be.

So I cannot accept, for example, Andrew Rehfeld’s attempt in these pages to segregate political theory into those elements that are fit to be included in political science and those that are not. Rehfeld’s argument rests explicitly on the assumption that “there are … epistemic reasons to recognize a … reasonably permanent division within the university between the social sciences and humanities.”^{Footnote 6} So foundational is this assumption (it is not really defended) in his argument that it causes Rehfeld to understand political theory as a mish-mash kind of field, with social-scientific elements and humanistic elements that exist side-by-side with no particular coherence. So it seems unproblematic to him to evict the humanistic parts from political science while allowing the others to remain.^{Footnote 7}

Indeed, if we allow the distinction between the humanities and social sciences to remain unquestioned then the lack of coherence that Rehfeld perceives in political theory will be the sensible conclusion. What is harder to explain then is the unity of the field that its practitioners generally feel, even if they have a hard time articulating its basis. But if, by contrast, we understand the field’s unity through its object—no longer the state only, but politics more broadly—rather than its method, then we will be on the path to a better understanding.

Universities, and academic study, are very old. The departmental structures within them, by contrast, are fairly recent (they date roughly from the first quarter of the twentieth century)—and the further effort to distinguish departments by method, as opposed to by subject matter, is more recent still. Rehfeld (and many others) take these boundaries for granted when, it seems to me, they are the most contingent part of academic organization—and are currently under more pressure now than they have been in decades. (Even economics, for example, is more methodologically diverse than it was twenty years ago.) Taking politics as a coherent object of study, however, is much older than any one method for doing so—by a factor of millennia.

If the version of political theory and its relation to both political science and the humanities I am defending sounds at all old-fashioned let me be clear that this is not because I think that the interpretation of old texts is, or has to be, our central function, but rather because I support an understanding of the field that is pre-Kantian, viz. one where the sharp division between humanistic and social-scientific inquiry was not recognized or considered important. So I do not see recent attempts by political theorists to study things like policing, immigration, and incarceration, for example, to be in any sense out of line but rather a restoration of the healthy pre-critical state of the field.^{Footnote 8}

But what would this actually mean or look like in relation to the study of texts and images? Surely we can’t go back to the pre-critical mere “appreciation” of art and literature that was the standard practice in the eighteenth century? Indeed not. As I mentioned before, hermeneutics has also evolved in the last hundred years, just as statistics and field work have. (It was part of Gadamer’s project to document that evolution.) By way of a more substantive answer, however, I want to say a little about my past work on narrative as well as my current interest in film. And then I want to say a few words about representation because it’s a topic that I think brings these issues together.

Although I’m not sure I would have put it this way at the time, when I took up the question of narrative in political theory in my first book, this was not for me a matter of simply reading political theory as literature or as if it were literature, although it is certainly the case that in calling attention to narrative, I was pointing at the sort of thing that one might expect a literature scholar to be interested in.^{Footnote 9}

It was, first of all, an attempt to respect the integrity of the texts in question, which didn’t necessarily abide by the Kantian division of inquiry through which they were usually studied. Political theory texts are themselves hard to categorize in Kantian terms. It is not just that some of them are humanistic and others social-scientific—individual texts contain both elements and do not appear bothered by this nor do they appear to feel the need (until recently at any rate) to justify it.

But secondly, I was attempting to purposefully disrespect the style of modern moral philosophy, with its propositional-deductive model of knowledge, as the necessary core of political theory. Not because that approach lacks value but because to conceive of moral reasoning as something that can be wholly isolated from the other elements of life—and here again, it’s a Wolinian point as well as a Gadamerian one—is an arbitrary practice, not reflected in many of the older texts we read nor in politics itself at any level.

Narrative is an inescapable element of our texts because time structures our lives and experiences in a fundamental way. To study narrative and time in politics and political theory, I believe, is not to ask merely aesthetic or rhetorical questions but actually to get at the deep structure of society that any political theorist (or political scientist for that matter) should want to examine. Synchronic analysis, whether in moral philosophy or social science, is deprived to the degree that it neglects this.

What I am trying to stress here is that seeing the kinship of political theory to the humanities is not primarily a matter of replacing moral and scientific questions with aesthetic or rhetorical ones, but instead of blending both kinds into a “discipline of questioning” that is holistic in its scope. The idea that humanism or artistry comes at the expense of science is not one that we should accept at all. Instead we should insist on the equality and plurality of questions just as we insist on the equality and plurality of persons—and for the same reasons. We cannot, if we are honest inquirers, claim to know in advance just what sort of inquiry will give us the insight that we need. That would be claiming, in effect, to know the object in advance, to know the endpoint of inquiry before it had begun.

Narrative still seems to me now a sort of obvious point of transmission—or area of overlap—where that equality or affinity between humanistic and social scientific concerns can be more easily seen or is more naturally visible—or to put it another way, a place where the distinction between aesthetic and moral and scientific questions makes little sense. On the one hand, narrative is clearly a trope of rhetoric and a central element in the artistic construction of many texts, including most philosophy texts before the twentieth century, and hence amenable to literary analysis. On the other, the temporality of experience is something that even analytic philosophy is not inclined to deny (with certain insane exceptions) and something that touches every part of social life. Social science cannot ignore it either. But too often, inquiries proceed on parallel tracks, neither admitting that they stand to benefit from interaction with the other.

So to me political theory that puts time and narrative at its center is just the kind of “discipline of questioning” that ignores the Kantian distinctions that separate art, morality, and society into different spheres and imagines them to be distinguishable objects. I would call it a synthetic practice—or, as Wolin did, an “integrative” one—except that it is only synthetic by way of repair, putting back together what there was never any reason to separate.

From this perspective, it should not seem so strange that political theorists have in the last few years begun to turn their attention increasingly to film. While Greek tragic drama has always played a large role in the political theory canon, I think we can see in recent work a more general interest in integrating aesthetic, moral, and political questions into a combined form of inquiry in which film, as our most dominant form of media (despite the internet, I would still make that claim) plays a central role. For putting moral and political questions to forms of narrative fiction really just is the same discipline of questioning as putting rhetorical questions to theoretical texts—the same, that is, once you remove the Kantian division that insists on a formal or generic difference.

For a long time, I think, political theorists would sometimes use film or television as an “illustration” of some theoretical point, and while there is nothing wrong with that (especially as a pedagogic practice), it reflects the tendency to think of media first of all as an aesthetic object rather than as something as capable of containing the sort of truth or falsehood we might find in a self-consciously theoretical text. Why we made a special exception only for ancient tragedy has always been mysterious to me—maybe we were just impressed by anything written in Greek. Or maybe it’s because what was preserved across the centuries was generally preserved for a reason—whereas we have to endure a thousand terrible romcoms and bromances before seeing anything contemporary worth remembering.

But the proportion of garbage to insight in our culture isn’t important here—although I’m doubtful that there would really be anything different in that regard between ancient Athens and Hollywood if we could really experience them in the same way, i.e., as the stuff of daily consumption. What’s important is that an art form that is both temporal but also capable of manipulating time and narrative in ways that aren’t available to any other art has a potential to reflect our life experience in unique ways. It stands to reason that there might be something to learn there. Obviously, I do not mean to denigrate the great work that has been done (and is still being done) on the theoretical and political import of Greek tragic drama. I am instead asking whether we might treat another form of visual narrative fiction with the same degree of seriousness and attention.

When I have written about films, I have done so out of the conviction that there was something there—in that particular film—that answered a question about, for example, sovereignty or representation, that had not been fully answered in a conventional text of political theory. And not because those texts lacked artistry or even images but because the film genre offers a medium for the expression of a temporal and erotic dimension to politics that those texts had failed to capture—a failure that is as much a scientific failure as an artistic failure or anything else. So, for example, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, we see an attempt to understand the origins of state authority in a kind of erotic contract between three people that survives their death and serves as the basis for a permanent balance of law and violence—something you don’t find in Locke or Rawls (or Riker or Dahl). Or so I attempted to argue.^{Footnote 10}

If I am correct, it does not mean that it is impossible to translate the filmed images’ meaning into analytic prose—obviously, in writing about them, I attempted to do so. It means only that, as with Greek tragic drama, some insights into the human condition are more easily expressed first in a particular medium—and from there can be further translated into other media and forms of discourse. Such translation might even result in some testable propositions. But this process cannot get started if we take narratives to be merely aesthetic phenomenon that only enrich our lives but never produce truthful insights. If this conclusion is wrong about Greek tragedy then it may be equally wrong about Hollywood westerns.

The intersection of the aesthetic and the political is particularly visible on the topic of representation and if I have one programmatic suggestion to make, it is that we should pay more attention to this overlap as a source of insight and a focus of analysis. There is, of course, a long and rich tradition of writing about representation in our field, and it is already an area in which political theory and political science do self-consciously connect to one another.^{Footnote 11} Still, there are elements of contemporary political representation that that literature has had difficulty in capturing.

You could say that we live in a golden age of political representation. Most western countries have representative institutions that are, by some traditional measures at least, extraordinarily responsive. Not only are elections generally free and fair; in between elections, elected representatives have the ability to stay in a high level of contact with their electorate. Reams of polling data can ascertain what the population in any district thinks and believes on an endless variety of subjects. Electronic communication and social media that are nearly free and instantaneous means that a flood of information, requests, demands, and opinions reaches our representatives on a daily basis. Traditional democratic theory fretted that elected representatives were prone to lose touch with their constituents, not only because of conflicting interests but just because time and distance could put them far away from home for extended periods. But if there ever were in the past good excuses for being out of touch with one’s electorate, modern technology has largely eradicated them.

If all this is true, then why do we remain so dissatisfied with representation and with our representatives? Even as our political deputies struggle to keep up with our ever-changing moods, one prominent mood among both the American and European electorates is one of profound dissatisfaction with our representative institutions. Whether one looks to the American “tea party” movement or Black Lives Matter or the reemergence of neo-fascist parties in Europe, there can be little doubt that a large segment, at least, of the population of most democracies has a deep antipathy to its own representatives, however responsive they may be.

I don’t think that we will find the answers to these questions by keeping our concepts of political and aesthetic representation isolated from one another. That does not mean that we want to turn political questions into aesthetic ones or vice-versa. It does mean that we might find answers to political questions in unexpected places.

There is a British documentary series called the UP films that we could call a natural experiment in this matter. Every seven years the same 14 people, originally chosen because they were from different social classes, are filmed going about their lives and given a chance to explain themselves. It has now been going on for nearly 50 years and by any cinematic measure these are some of the best represented humans in the history of the film medium. They now have control over the content and the editing of the films and are paid for participating. And yet, just like contemporary angry voters, most of them don’t like doing it and constantly complain about how they are represented, to the point that at least one subject refuses to watch the films that have made him famous.

Why should this be? If we look at the films carefully, an answer does emerge. Beyond their complaints about past editing choices, the participants express a frustration that however scrupulously and honestly they are filmed, there is a loss in the process that cannot be made good. There is an unbridgeable gap between the speaking and acting that the camera records and the thinking and feeling that is the actual experience of who they are. That is, there is a gap between their status as objects of representation and their experience as subjects. If the best and most democratic documentary in human history fails to capture its subjects to their satisfaction, what hope does a Congressman have?

That kind of representative failure is not something that can be cured by more information, clearer communication, or more honesty and faithfulness by the media or people we choose to represent us. It is the kind of inherent problem with representative institutions that we are loath to acknowledge in politics because we don’t want to believe there is necessarily a sacrifice involved in representative democracy—we would prefer to believe that our dissatisfaction arises from some corruption of the institutions or those who inhabit them. And so we go on measuring transparency, faithfulness, and corruption without ever reaching an understanding of the origins of representative dissatisfaction.

For Jean-Jacques Rousseau representation itself was slavery.^{Footnote 12} And while I would not go that far, we might begin to think here about how representation is simultaneously a threat to democracy as well as a servant of it—and how that is a conclusion it might be somewhat easier to see on a screen than on a page.

All this is just a quick sketch of some interesting material and is not meant at all as a real conclusion but as a hypothesis—a quick example of the “discipline of questioning” than can emerge when we break down the boundary between the humanities and social sciences and use all the evidence we have—from whatever source—to get us the answers that we need about how to build free institutions and how to keep them.

The UP films were not intended to make the point I have been arguing—their original intention was to indict Britain’s class structure. But the fact that interpretation is required to make visible the truth that an object contains is not a weakness of either the object or the method. It does not make the conclusions arbitrary—they are as conditioned by the evidence as much as any other—even if they do not make the claim of certainty that some forms of science aspire to (but rarely reach in any case). Whether my hypothesis here is right or wrong, productive or unproductive, I do not think much will be gained by attempting to classify it as humanistic or social-scientific. Disciplinary clarity is no reward if it takes us further away from the complex political reality we seek, by diverse means, to understand.

Interdisciplinarity is the current academic fashion and, as suspicious as I am of such fashions, its challenge to prevailing department structures might be one worth contemplating. If it is only the temporary alliance of fixed disciplines then, from the perspective I have been attempting to articulate, it will only have local benefits. But if it is a genuine attempt to experiment with modes of inquiry that scramble, or disrespect, existing disciplinary boundaries then perhaps it will illuminate for others the value that political theorists have long seen in their own habits. A theory that is “general and integrative” as Wolin wished for should, it seems to me, have both humanistic and social-scientific elements. Whether this occurs inside traditional departments or between them is ultimately of little import—so long as it actually happens.

Political science today has grown fond of experiments—perhaps it will soon see the value in experimenting on its own body, so to speak? Or is that too optimistic? Certainly many political theorists have little hope that their political science colleagues are interested in pluralizing their methods. But it is not optimism to see the changes that have happened in the history of our field as a sign that no mode of inquiry, nor definition of science, is particularly stable or permanent. What stability the field possesses derives from its subject. But politics as a phenomenon is vast, diverse, and does not come with its own tools or instructions. We cannot afford to dismiss avenues of understanding because they take us into humanistic neighborhoods.

When Samuel Beckett attempted to strip theatre down to its most essential elements, he found that his characters didn’t have a lot to say. And he mostly ended up documenting their failure to say much of anything. He proposed that we think of this kind of work as a useful serial failure: “Fail again, fail better,” he said. I would not claim to know that dismantling the barriers between the humanities and the social sciences will bring us any more success as political theorists—we will still struggle to understand a complex ocean, navigating by tiny lights in stormy weather. But steering in the direction suggested here might help us to fail again and to fail our democracy and its citizens somewhat better along the way.