Survey texts exercise considerable violence upon the thinkers and works they assess. Andrew Vincent is no pacifist. Yet his book succeeds admirably in gaining breadth without unduly sacrificing depth and subtlety. Vincent's encyclopedic knowledge (with more than 500 titles in the bibliography) is coupled with a sharp critical eye and refreshingly blunt appraisals. The result is a thoughtful and wide-ranging interpretation of twentieth-century Western political thought.

Political theory grounded upon a (retrospectively imposed) canon of thinkers and texts did not gain disciplinary status until the mid–twentieth century, with its first independent journals appearing in the 1970s. The institutionalization of theory quickly produced a coterie of professionals speaking to one another in specialized languages. What perpetuates the discipline these days, Vincent suggests, are not political concerns that demand urgent resolution, but “immensely powerful institutional, career, and professional interests” that bear the “dubious patina of political engagement” (p. 27). His deprecation of the discipline's self-enclosure parallels John Gunnell's worries about the alienation of political theory from politics (e.g., The Descent of Political Theory, 1993; The Orders of Discourse, 1998). Ironically and, perhaps, consistently, Vincent himself never links developments in the discipline to changes in the world outside the ivory tower, with the exception of a brief reflection on the “background reasons” for the rise of interest in pluralism. In this respect, The Nature of Political Theory merely gestures at the worldly reflections that it chastises theorists for neglecting.

Vincent focuses on political theory's preoccupation with “foundations,” the (quasi) metaphysical realities that are meant to supply objective standards for moral and political judgment. By and large, twentieth-century theorists have rejected thick, comprehensive, universal foundations, opting instead for thinner, weaker means of support. While Vincent ignores earlier efforts to grapple with this issue, such as Don Herzog's Without Foundations (1985) or Stephen K. White's Sustaining Affirmation (2000), he does provide a stimulating assessment of the field's foundational angst.

Vincent adeptly summarizes the discipline's efforts to secure minimalist foundations. He examines, for example, the historical foundations sought by Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, and J. G. A. Pocock; the empirical or analytical foundations sought by David Easton, other behavioralists, and rational choice theorists; the neo-Kantian foundations sought by John Rawls and Brian Barry; the neo-Aristotelian, conventional, narrative, or experiential foundations sought by Michael Oakeshott, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor; and the linguistic (non)foundations sought by neo-Wittgensteinian, Nietzschean, or Heideggerian thinkers, such as Peter Winch, Richard Rorty, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and William Connolly.

Vincent concludes his survey with a plea for theorists to reexamine the benefits of minimalist dialogic foundations, as exemplified in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. While sympathetic to Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics, Vincent believes that Gadamerian hermeneutics offers the best rebuttal to the postmodernists' outright rejection of foundations.

Gadamer's “hermeneutic circle” exposes the means by which our fore-conceptions interact with our reflective deliberations to allow informed and self-conscious understanding. We cannot and should not hope to escape the particularity of our being, as we are largely constituted by the prejudices that ground us historically and socially, including the “prejudice for reason” that animates so much contemporary political theory (p. 300). Fore-conceptions allow access to the world and facilitate the process of dialogic interaction. Opposing reflective reason to prejudice bestows the former with a “false power.” Rather than pursue a Habermasian quest for the universal pragmatics of reasoned speech, Vincent suggests, political theorists would do better by engaging in hermeneutic efforts to bring their fore-conceptions to the foreground.

To experience something hermeneutically is to have prejudices revealed and challenged. This is an interminable process. Yet Vincent argues that it would be wrong to think of hermeneutics as relativist or postmodern. To be sure, there are for Gadamer no ethical or political absolutes. There is no Archimedian point from which one might gain access to pristine truths, uncontaminated by linguistically mediated understanding. Still, hermeneuticists seek a fusion of horizons, a commensurability of concerns if not a consensus in resolutions. As such, they cultivate an ethic of psychological and moral growth.

At the end of the day, psychological and moral maturity amounts to a form of Socratic wisdom—a knowing that one knows nothing. Just as Socrates sought to test and reconfirm his wisdom by venturing into the agora each day, so hermeneutic engagement with texts and people affords endless opportunities to foreground one's own (and others') prejudices. While firm foundations can never be secured, the human desire to seek them is understood to be unquenchable. The wise person (and good theorist), while tempering expectations, never abandons the search for truth.

The psychological and moral maturity that develops from hermeneutic exercise is identified by Vincent as practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is not “rational certainty, fixity of purpose, and decisive proof” (p. 322), but rather the skillful navigation of an ambiguous, contingent, and dynamic world. Here, he might well have explored why Gadamer, having attended Heidegger's lectures on Aristotle, identified practical wisdom as a hermeneutic virtue.

Pitting Gadamer against Habermas, Vincent argues that hermeneutics militates against the “hubris of universalism” (p. 323). But Vincent does not address how and why practical wisdom, while inherently embedded in language, is not reducible to it. There are tacit and affective dimensions to practical wisdom (recognized by Aristotle as habit and desire) that have extralinguistic qualities and foundations. Vincent, like most political theorists, is enamored by cognition. Thus, he ignores extralinguistic qualities and foundations. Engaging in dialogue with those who shed light on these extralinguistic dimensions of practical judgment would go some ways to helping political theory escape its self-enclosure.