STRANGE SILENCES

Are facts relevant to what political theorists do? Should they be? Consider Isaac’s question about why journals in political theory published little work about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Isaac (Reference Isaac1995, 636–42) wrote that “following the revolutions of 1989, political theorists published a total of 384 articles, of which a mere 2” discussed the events of 1989. For Isaac, this elision flags political theory’s overinvestment in abstruse debates and its disinterest in analysis of occurrent politics.

Is political theory more topically engaged than it was following 1989? To shed light on this question, I collected every full-length political theory article published in APSR, PT, and Polity from 1974 to 1976, 2005 to 2007, and 2017 to 2019 (N=385) and examined each for its engagement with major political events preceding its publication. To test several of Isaac’s possible explanations, I also noted discussions about the fall of communism in Europe and engagement with conventional historical figures in the discipline. I chose these three periods to maximize the length of the analysis. This study focuses on full-length, peer-reviewed articles; book reviews, corrigenda, errata, letters, annual meeting programs, obituaries, and articles that fall outside the subfield of political theory were excluded.

METHOD AND CODING DECISIONS

The category I call “topical” records engagement with current political issues generally, not only with headlining wars or scandals. An article on policing in Topeka, for example, would be as relevant as an article about a major war. I did not choose periods based on judgments about the events that they follow but instead to maximize the length of time under analysis—which, for practical reasons, starts when PT’s archive begins in the early 1970s. Finally, articles must have engaged concrete issues via their central line of inquiry or argument; those that examined an abstract question and then introduced a real-world “implication” in their final pages did not count.

I read and manually coded 385 relevant articles. There is by necessity a degree of judgment involved in differentiating more or less topical concerns. To give readers a more granular sense of these coding decisions and of this article’s findings more generally, examples of texts coded as topical or not topical follow.

In the November 1975 issue of PT, Schrag (Reference Schrag1975) examined “the child’s status in the democratic state” by evaluating different arguments for and against children being excluded from the right to vote, citing work by Cohen (Reference Cohen1971) and Pateman (Reference Pateman1970), among others. Schrag’s article stands as an example of the type of work that does not touch directly on a great historical event but nevertheless addresses concrete concerns (e.g., Should the voting age be lower? How should children be treated in democracies?). This article was coded as topical. Consider for contrast Glass’s (Reference Glass1976, 503) article, “Machiavelli’s Prince & Alchemical Transformation: Action & the Archetype of Regeneration,” which appeared the following summer in Polity and which “discerns in The Prince symbol patterns that are reminiscent of the work of the alchemist with their roots in medieval thought.” The appearance of alchemical images and vocabulary in Machiavelli’s work may represent an important turn in Machiavelli scholarship and well may hold implications for the politics of the 1970s and today. However, Glass’s article did not centrally address any concrete event at the time. It was coded as not topical.

In “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Brown (Reference Brown2006) placed the US-led war in Iraq, the “abrogation of civil liberties,” and other fissures in the political institutions of the United States within the context of wider pressures on US democracy during the second Bush era. Earlier that year, also in PT, Frazer (Reference Frazer2006) wrote an article titled, “Esotericism Ancient and Modern: Strauss Contra Straussianism on the Art of Political-Philosophical Writing,” which applied the interpretive esotericism made famous by Leo Strauss to Strauss himself. For reasons similar to those described previously, Brown’s article was coded as topical; Frazer’s was not.

In “Deliberation, Accountability, and Legitimacy: A Case Study of Police-Community Forums,” Wahl and White (Reference Wahl and White2017) combined a “case study of police-community forums in a mid-sized Southern city” with the work of Jürgen Habermas to discuss—among other issues—how power relations condition prospects for democratic deliberation. Also in Polity, Webb (Reference Webb2019, 202) argued in “When Open Borders Must Stay Open: Expectations and Freedom of Movement” that a state’s “right to self-determination does not legitimately extend to closing” its border crossings in the event that openness and the expectation thereof have “already been consolidated as…a social fact.” Both articles, by Wahl and White and by Webb, were coded as topical. Kundmueller (Reference Kundmueller2018) argued in “On the Importance of Penelope” that—contrary to prior scholars’ focus on Penelope’s private virtues and/or her distinctly feminine political abilities—it is her “gender-neutral virtues,” such as “intelligence, courage, and self-restraint,” that matter politically. This article, like the others, appeared in Polity and, unlike the others, was not found to be topical. (To be clear, none of the articles that failed to be coded as topical had anything “wrong” with them. They simply did not address occurrent issues in the way that the topical work mentioned previously did.)

During the same period under study, commentaries on canonical thinkers such as Plato and Locke remained flat across all samples studied. From 1974 to 1976, 41 of 101 articles in Polity, APSR, and PT focused on conventional historical figures, or slightly more than 40%. Isaac reported that this figure was 44.4% for the articles published in PT in the early 1990s. I found that 46.5% of articles in APSR, Polity, and PT from 2005 to 2007 and slightly more than 40% in those same journals from 2017 to 2019 primarily discussed conventional historical figures. For better or worse, there has been no significant increase or decrease in this type of article for 45 years. One implication of this finding is that the increase in politically engaged articles has not come from cannibalizing space for work on the history of political theory. The two forms of inquiry, which sometimes are assumed to be opposed, do not appear to be inversely correlated. Moreover, several articles coded as topical involved detailed commentary on conventional historical figures. Consider, for example, McCormick’s (Reference McCormick2007, appearing in PT) use of Guicciardini and Machiavelli to propose reforms to the US Constitution aimed at increasing the accountability of elites, or Lane and Clark’s (Reference Lane and Clark2006, also in PT) use of Rousseau to test certain claims made on behalf of deep ecology.

Readers may ask fairly why this article focuses on Polity, PT, and APSR instead of Isaac’s five journals (i.e., Polity, PT, APSR, Ethics, and Philosophy and Public Affairs [PPA]). In fact, Ethics and PPA were included in my first pass of data collection. They revealed an interesting pattern that is beyond the scope of this article but that I will briefly describe. At the same time that articles within political theory “proper” (i.e., Polity, PT, and APSR) were growing more topical, articles in moral philosophy were moving in the opposite direction. The two subfields overlap often and productively, which made the trend more surprising than it otherwise would have been. Moral philosophy articles were quite topical in the 1970s and had been declining or flat in the decades since (e.g., PPA published approximately 53% topical articles in 1974–1976, 40% in 2005–2007, and 32% in 2017–2019). The effect was to make it seem that in the journals chosen by Isaac in 1995, levels of topicality had remained unchanged from the 1970s to the 2010s when in fact they had shifted steadily in opposite directions in the subfields of political theory and moral philosophy.

FINDINGS

The results, discussed here and presented in a table and as a linear regression (tables 1 and 2), first indicated that discussion of specific events has remained infrequent, consistent with Isaac’s findings in 1989–1993. However, discussion of topical events generally has increased sharply.

Table 1 Proportion of Topical Political Theory Articles Published by Year, 1974-1976, 2005-2007, and 2017-2019, with Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Line of Best Fit

Table 2 Journal Topicality (Specific Topic and Generally) Across Four Periods, with Isaac’s 1989–1993 Data Included

In 2005, 2006, and 2007, for example, political theorists placed 142 articles in Polity, PT, and APSR. One article was concerned with the ongoing US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and none were concerned with climate change. In the 1970s, these numbers appear similar to their successors in 1989–1993, 2005–2007, and 2017–2019. Of 101 articles published from 1974 to 1976, none were concerned with the war in Vietnam and none with the expanding scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

The miniscule number of articles about specific topical issues seems, as Isaac argued in 1995, somewhat remarkable. Is it really the case that political theorists in 1974 should have had so much more to write about Locke than about Vietnam? That political thought in 2005 or 2018 should produce many reinterpretations of Nietzsche but so few about climate change? However, a set of interesting patterns emerges when articles are coded for their topicality generally rather than with reference to specific events. Coding for topicality, as discussed previously, has the advantage of smoothing out event-specific variance in the data. From 1974 to 1976, 11 of 101 articles (10.9%) addressed occurrent political topics. From 2005 to 2007, approximately 15.5% of 142 articles were similarly topical. From 2017 to 2019, the number of topical articles increased to 20.4% (also a total of 142). This is surprising: engagement with concrete issues appears to have doubled.

EXPLANATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

How can the rise of engagement within political theory be explained and what does it augur? I first evaluate four possible explanations from Isaac—some of which he thought were true, some of which he thought were false. Then I present nine possible explanations of my own and give reasons for thinking each is more or less plausible. Finally, I argue that increased engagement with the world cannot be understood outside of the institutional and intellectual production of a world amenable to theoretical analysis.

Isaac (Reference Isaac1995) first considered the explanation that “the inattention to the revolutions in Central Europe and Russia” stems from a linguistic and cultural split: theorists in the United States and Western Europe rarely read, for example, Russian, Czech, or the South Slavic continuum dialects, so they are unlikely to discuss events in the countries that speak those languages. This explanation can be tested by looking at several later events that have few cultural barriers separating them from political theorists in the United States or the United Kingdom. Issues such as climate change, the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump are hardly distant (linguistically or culturally) from readers of PT, APSR, and Polity. However, I found that the rate at which these events appear in journals is not significantly different from Isaac’s (Reference Isaac1995) findings about 1989. For example, Isaac found that 0.5% of journal articles following 1989 discussed the collapse of communism in Europe. By comparison, 0.7% of journal articles from 2005 to 2007 discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The likelihood of climate-change discussion from 2005 to 2007 and from 2017 to 2019 combined also was 0.7%. As a result, I found no support for the idea that linguistic–cultural differences were responsible for the scant discussion of the collapse of communism in Europe.

Second, Isaac (Reference Isaac1995, 642) suggested that “American political theory has become a thoroughly professionalized academic subdiscipline, where even the intellectual ‘subversives’ are insulated, academicized, their intellectual practices routinized.” I think there is little contesting this observation, but can it account for political theory’s apparent distance from current events? After all, many highly professionalized academic disciplines remain engaged with the concrete events connected to their area of study. Academic professionalization and routinization may contribute to scholars writing about what scholars before them have written about, but the exact role that such transformations play remains unclear. Moreover, the academic professionalization that Isaac described in 1995 has not abated, whereas engagement with concrete issues appears to have risen, not declined, over time. This fact casts some doubt on the explanatory power of this angle.

Third, Isaac (Reference Isaac1995, 643) posited that despite theorists’ widespread recognition that “political writing is a thoroughly historical and contextual activity, that in some sense wherever there is politics there is political theory…if one looks at what political theorists actually write about, one finds…a canon of—mostly dead—political writers.” He offered another dose of empirical evidence: “Since 1989, for example, 48 out of 108 articles in Political Theory…were on fairly conventional historical figures, [e.g.] Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, and others” (Isaac Reference Isaac1995, 641–43). As discussed previously, new data presented in this article provide no evidence of a long-term trend in the frequency of discussion of “conventional historical figures.” At least since the 1970s, there has been no statistically significant movement in the frequency with which dead writers trouble living theorists (or vice versa).

Isaac’s (Reference Isaac1995, 643-44) fourth possible explanation was that “[c]ontemporary political theory is plagued by an aversion to first-order questions” in favor of “theoretical depth or profundity.” He wrote that it “seems beneath” theorists “to examine mundane, practical political problems located in space and time, in particular places with particular histories.” The evidence I gathered for this article cannot confirm or disconfirm this conjecture. If it were once true, it appears less so today because journal articles have grown gradually more likely to discuss what Isaac called first-order questions.

I considered four possible explanations from Isaac to explain the lack of published articles that address the events of 1989. Three explanations that Isaac thought were reasonable and that are mostly related to political theory’s conventionalism and scant interest in first-order questions are suggestive. However, they would have to be modified to account for the fact that concrete engagement in political theory has risen, not fallen, over the past five decades—knowledge that did not exist when Isaac was writing. However, we do now have such knowledge. As a result, I considered nine new explanations that may account for the secular rise in topicality and provide my reasons for thinking each true or untrue. These explanations comprise three interrelated groups: movements in ideas and events, demographic shifts, and institutional changes. Note that, first, each idea is about both what scholars choose to write about and what they choose to approve when they act as gatekeepers at journals. Because the pool of scholars who serve as editors and reviewers at academic journals overlaps considerably with the pool of scholars who submit articles to journals, disentangling the two is neither tractable nor likely to be helpful. Moreover, the expectations of scholars about what counts as publishable within the subfield are likely to condition what they write—that is, writers’ guesses about gatekeepers’ views matter. These facts are part of the broader processes that determine what type of topic can serve as the basis for legitimate work in the field. With that said, consider several possible explanations as follows.

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Explanation I: The increasing salience of climate change and other political, economic, and environmental events (e.g., the financial crisis and global recession of 2008, the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change) of outsize importance in the past 45 years has led to a more engaged political theory.

However: There appear to be many important and urgent-seeming events at virtually every point in recorded history. Moreover, climate change and several other significant events, like the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, were coded for in this analysis and accounted for a modest proportion of the increase. Climate change, for example, is directly responsible for two of 51 topical articles from 2005 to 2007 and from 2017 to 2019 combined. Therefore, at a first approximation, we should expect it to directly explain less than 10% of the increase in topicality.

Explanation II: The increasing prominence of race, gender, and sexuality as topics of legitimate discussion within political theory during the past 45 years can explain the observed increase in topicality.

However: Even if true, these facts cannot fully explain the shift toward topicality because a majority of the contemporary articles coded as topical did not focus on race, gender, or sexuality. Moreover, questions of race, gender, and sexuality were hardly absent from journals in the 1970s, which means that their rise within political theory has not been as steep as it may appear to observers in the 2020s.

Explanation III: In the United States, the academy grew more politically liberal in the second half of the twentieth century (Eagan et al. Reference Eagan, Stolzenberg, Lozano, Aragon, Suchard and Hurtado2014, 117; Gross Reference Gross2013), potentially decreasing the perceived costs of addressing politically contentious issues. If political theorists believe that most other theorists are in broad agreement with them, they may be more likely to broach topics with concrete stakes.

However: The designation “liberal” in the studies that find that the academy has grown more liberal tends to bind together a number of disparate academic groups, many of which have spent decades in vigorous disagreement (sometimes even in print). These divisions are especially profuse in fields like philosophy and political science, in which the components of a term like “liberal” are themselves objects of study and contestation. Moreover, it is not clear whether academics, especially those with tenure, would be sufficiently dissuaded by the prospect of disagreement or disapproval from peers such that they might focus on one topic and not another. Or, if this hypothesis is understood as describing a more subtle and unconscious shift in what one feels safe writing about, it is genuinely unknown whether these changes would be substantial enough to account for the observed change in topicality.

Explanation IV: The proliferation of certain Left-academic factions and journals has led to an increase in debate over occurrent issues important to the Left and has raised the status and throughput of outlets publishing on those issues.

However: This state of affairs surely has been true for some time, unless advocates of this explanation would have us believe that there was little Left factionalism or academic factionalism in the 1970s. (I am told there was no shortage.) The overall growth in territory and gates controlled by Left-academic factions may be a factor with partial explanatory power, however.

Explanation V: A shift away from the “grand” or high theory of earlier generations combined with the perception of analytic-style philosophy as staid can account for increases in topicality across the field. Rightly or not, theorists are reacting to what they see as the conceptual limits and assumptions of prior generations’ work.

However: This type of generational reaction and counter-reaction is common to established academic fields, but it also is difficult to measure. If this explanation is part of the correct narrative, it seems to have occurred without the discipline explicitly signaling it. For example, not one of the topical articles examined in this study begins by lambasting “analytic philosophy,” “grand theory,” or a similar composite character.

Explanation VI: About 78% of faculty positions at US universities in 1970 were full time. By 2012, that percentage had fallen to 51% (Magness Reference Magness2016). It is possible that part-time professors, for any number of possible reasons, are more interested in engagement with concrete issues than are full-time faculty.

However: If the change in aggregate academic employment status from 1970 to 2012 fully explains the increase in engagement from the 1970s to the 2010s, the difference in concreteness between full- and part-time faculty would have to be enormous. If we assume that this explanation is correct and hold everything constant except the shift in full- and part-time jobs, then the likelihood of full-time faculty writing a topical article would need to be 0.032 and the likelihood of part-time faculty would have to be at least 0.383—more than an order of magnitude higher. ¹ The predicted magnitude of difference between full- and part-time professors is probably too big to be the sole explanation for changes in topicality.

Explanation VII: The observed increases in topicality may be part of a wider shift across political science, the social sciences and the humanities, or the academy generally. Perceptions of acceptable subject matter for academic work may have shifted within various fields by either broadening generally or moving in a more concrete direction. Either type of shift means that work on more concrete topics would be more likely to be written and accepted for publication in top journals.

However: The evidence from moral philosophy—that those articles have become, if anything, less topical over time—militates against this idea. At the same time, the increasing salience of topic-focused “studies” in fields like area or gender studies may lend support to this idea. A broader survey, at a much higher level of generality, is required to map the differences between and emergence of new ways of engaging with concrete topics in the academy.

Explanation VIII: The throughput of all intellectual labor performed on and around Earth is much higher than at any prior point. There are approximately three orders of magnitude more universities on the planet than there were, for example, in 1300 CE (i.e., a few dozen versus approximately 25,000 in 2020), and each university supports far more professors and students to do intellectual work. Moreover, the work that these professors and students do has been made increasingly productive by various technologies (both informational and physical) that previously did not exist. The total amount of intellectual production on Earth is currently between four and 10 orders of magnitude greater than it was for most of human history and one to four orders of magnitude greater than it was in 1960. For example, approximately 8,773 doctorates were completed across all fields in 1958 in the United States. In 2018, that number was 55,195, an approximate sixfold increase during a period when the US population less than doubled (National Science Foundation 2019). Growth in countries including China, India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Indonesia has been even more rapid. Nigeria increased its number of universities from six in the 1970s to more than 50 in 2005 (Akudolu and Adeyemo Reference Akudolu and Adeyemo2018). The question of what do with this torrent of intellectual labor has been made less than consciously by institutional decisions, funding structures, and the crossing winds of disciplinary interests and fashions. In many areas of study, this swelling flow of work has flooded the lowlands of recondite theoretical involutions, commentaries on commentaries, and applications of familiar techniques to new territories of text. In other areas, however, additional intellectual throughput has been used to investigate specific areas of current interest. The enterprise of finding things out about the world, broadly construed, now has far more watts of human and nonhuman cognition dedicated to it than ever before. It is possible that some scale effect exists whereby this quantitative increase leads to certain qualitative changes, including an increase in the theoretically informed discussion of concrete topics.

However: It is not clear that a sharp quantitative increase in total intellectual work does lead to any set of qualitative changes, and it is further unclear that this putative set of qualitative changes could explain the shift in political theory toward more engaged work. Such a change could be used to explain movement in the opposite direction or be accountable for no pattern at all. One strategy for more robustly investigating this connection that is beyond the scope of this article is to search for any relationship between the growth of a field and changes in its areas of interest. Are fields that are experiencing rapid growth more likely to examine new areas of concrete interest? Are contracting fields more likely to become concerned with reinterpreting certain keystone texts? Perhaps there is no relationship at all, and other factors better explain movement toward or away from concrete work.

Explanation IX: The shifts recorded in this article are random noise. The possibility that this explanation is true, according to the foregoing regression and analysis of variance, is about one in 40.

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The foregoing explanations are not sufficiently systematic or comprehensive to have covered the space of possible causes for political theory’s rise in topicality. It is probably more fruitful to consider the problem in terms of heterogenous patterns consisting of and in turn constituting discrete apparent explanations. The publishing cycles in any field exhibit macroscale patterns for reasons not fully understood or articulable at the time of their realization. Various factors feed into these macrocycles, from how (or “the way in which”) students are admitted to graduate schools to how article topics come to be seen or not seen as appropriate for publication. The data analyzed in this article potentially reflect one of these macrocycles, or a component of it. However, it can be asked which of these nine possible explanations is most convincing, given the evidence available and the internal complexity and unclear borders of the phenomenon under discussion. In my view, explanations II (i.e., the salience of gender, race, and similar topics), IV (i.e., a proliferation of Left-academic factions, gatekeepers, and journals), V (i.e., a shift away from high theory), and VI (i.e., the increase of part-time faculty) contribute to a true account. It seems possible that theory—much in the same way that all academic fields engender a process of reaction against previous practitioners—has moved away from high theory and increased its openness to analysis of the concrete topics. This transition has been slow and it likely has been influenced by the rising concern around topics of contemporary interest such as race, gender, and climate change and by the changing composition of the discipline.

Each combination of explanations has different implications for political theory’s future. If the idea of a shift away from high theory is true, for example, then it predicts a future theory that could reverse itself when future generations of scholars come into prominence. If explanations I, II, and other “specific issues” accounts are true, then they predict a future theory in which analyses of climate change, human survivability, violence, and racial and gender justice assume a greater degree of prominence—if, indeed, the events that drive these concerns continue their Shepard-tone rise. It is necessary to consider not only explanations for the interest and disinterest of political theory in certain types of topics over time but also the implications of the subfield’s slow increase in engagement.

It seems likely, for example, that increasing professionalization and conventionalism within political theory has occurred as a part of rather than in opposition to rising engagement with topical issues. Political theorists’ interest in concrete topics is not separate from their work in the history of political thought or their “metatheoretical” concerns but rather gives context to and is contextualized by these concerns. It is appropriate to use a familiar phrase: these practices “mutually constitute” one another. An interest in what Isaac (Reference Isaac1995) called second-order theoretical questions creates the conditions and tools for the examination of concrete topics within political theory. However, the familiar claim of mutual constitution, although not wrong, also is probably too easy. As I suggest in another context, “[i]t is one thing to claim mutual constitution in the familiar parlance of theory and another to say how specifically such terms are constituted mutually” (Mohorčich Reference Mohorčich2021). It seems increasingly apparent to me, having read 385 papers from three generations of theory, that certain intellectual conventions make possible the examination of certain “real events” as they once made possible the discussions of previous generations of theorists. An external world representing a new territory for analysis is not contrary to processes of convention making but rather has been produced as interpretable by these same processes. This is not to claim (cynically or hermetically) that the world does not exist and is produced only by academic discourse. Rather, the interfaces between the world and political theory are produced anew as the discipline remakes itself. At issue is whether political theory’s renewed examination of real events and its deepening academic professionalization render its work more or less useful.