I

The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory is one of a series of handbooks on political science published by Oxford – the others being:

• ‘Contextual Political Analysis’ and ‘Public Policy’

• Political Institutions

• Political Behavior

• Comparative Politics

• Law and Politics

• Political Economy

• International Relations

• Political Methodology

Its range is very wide and certainly – as the table of contents attests to – goes beyond what has usually been conceived of as political theory. The contents are divided into 11 parts – ‘Introduction’, ‘Contemporary Currents’, ‘The Legacy of the Past’, ‘Political Theory in the World’, ‘State and People’, ‘Justice, Equality and Freedom’, ‘Pluralism, Multiculturalism, and Nationalism’, ‘Claims in a Global Context’, ‘The Body Politic’, ‘Testing the Boundaries’ and ‘Old and New’ – and 46 chapters.

The chapters do indeed attest to the very heterogeneous and diversified thematic approach to political theory, and the geographical spread thereof, including for instance chapters on Islamic and Confucian theories and on the European Union – as well as a rather original chapter on American exceptionalism from the point of view of the American political self-conception and not, as in the work of S.M. Lipset or Daniel Bell, from the point of view of the non-development of socialism in the US or, as has been presented by Luis Hartz, from the point of view of the distinctiveness of American liberalism.

Needless to say, one can find also topics which have not been taken up in separate chapters, such as for instance war or Empires – the references to the latter being closely connected to post-colonial discussion – or terrorism which is not to be found in the index and the discussions thereof are dispersed throughout different chapters. But such a situation is in a sense unavoidable – not all the topics which could bear in some way on political theory as it is conceived here could possibly be included.

It would, of course, also be impossible to give a detailed analysis of the different chapters – be it of their specific topics or of their implications for political theory. But beyond such details, the overall structure of the handbook, its major assumptions and those of most of the chapters do point to some basic characteristics – at least as presented here – of contemporary political theory as compared with its predecessors, i.e. with the classical exposition, as well as to some of the problems and challenges these characteristics entail.

On the one hand, there is indeed a far-reaching diversification of themes, including some of the most recent controversies in philosophy in general, especially in moral philosophy, critical theory, and political ideologies. On the other hand, there is relatively little preoccupation with some of the central problems of classic political theory, such as for instance the nature of the constitution, of the political nature of the state and its forms, the structure of power and regulation thereof, and how these problems have been transformed under the impact of globalization, the emergence of new international arenas, the constitution of new regulative agencies, and of the political actors in them.

These problems are, of course, discussed in many of the chapters, but on the whole in a very dispersed way and not as the central foci of discussions – it is not entirely clear to what extent these problems are conceived here as being central to political theory. Indeed, in the introduction to the volume, the editors made a very strong claim for a more pluralistic and diversified approach.

Indeed in many ways, most of the chapters illustrate some of the features which characterized the mainstream of contemporary political theories since the end of the second world war – be it the liberal one or the major critics thereof – namely the bracketing out of the concern with ‘the political’, giving paradoxically rise to a political theory without the political. These characteristics of most of the post-second world war political theories have been pointed out, perhaps paradoxically by leftist scholars such as Chantal Muffet – who is indeed discussed in the handbook – who took up some of the challenges of Carl Schmitt who claimed that such bracketing out entails the neglect of power, of the agonistic and conflictual dimensions of political life and processes, and of the fact that any concrete institutional arrangements entail the establishment of hegemonic power.

An important indication of this tendency is the fact that there is no full fledged discussion of the fact that the boundaries of what is considered as the boundaries the realm of the political and the appropriate scope of political action; it is not a constant given, but it constitutes in modern societies a focus of continual contestation and that it is indeed such struggle about the redefinition of the realm of the political that constitutes one of the major problems of political analysis.

II

One of the most important repercussions of the basic tendencies in political theory analysed above has been the development, which was very strong in the US and then expanded also to Europe, to separate political theory from empirical political social and behavioural and institutional research. Probably such institutional analysis will be the subject of other hand-books – but it is certainly missing in most of the chapters of this volume.

There are, of course, some very important exceptions to this situation. The most outstanding one is Rajeev Bhargava's chapter on secularism which combines an incisive analysis of the different notions, conceptions, and problematics of secularism with different institutional patterns thereof and this implication for the basic theoretical problems of political theory. Similarly, such combination to some extent can be found also in chapter 22 on democracy and citizenship, as well as in the chapter on civil society which does clearly indicate some of the institutional dimensions of the different conceptions of civil society.

As against this, while many aspects of multiculture are discussed in two chapters – 30 and 36 – and referred to in other ones – yet they are not connected in a systematic way with analysis of different patterns of multiculturalism in different societies and the theoretical implications thereof.

Thus indeed, this handbook presents a very rich and diversified picture of the contemporary political theory – its engagement with a very wide range of themes and problems – but on the other hand does also present the loss or at least weakening of what has been considered as central foci thereof, indicating that the reconstitution of the propblematiques of these modes of discourse present the greatest challenge to contemporary political theory.