We may, potentially at least, see the beginnings of a methodology for political theory if we look more closely at the questions posed, for instance the basic question of how society ought to be organised. Clearly, such normative questions – questions which ask about what ought to be rather than what actually is – set political theory apart from mainstream social or political science:
A distinction can be made between positive and normative political analysis. The difference between them is mainly one of different purpose. Whereas positive analysis has a descriptive and explanatory purpose, normative analysis has an evaluative purpose. To be sure, normative analysis often relies on empirical
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knowledge, such as knowledge of how existing institutions distribute benefits and burdens. And perceptions of what is right and what is wrong also sometimes affect political decision-making. Normative analysis thus often relies on empirical premises, and perceptions of right and wrong can have profound effects on institutional design or political decision-making. But whereas the purpose of an empirical analysis is description and explanation, the purpose of a normative analysis is to assess the degree to which particular institutions, practices or decisions can be defended, from a moral point of view. (Semb 2000:11-12)
There are two basic ways to begin the normative enterprise, one corresponding to the first approach discussed above in section 1.4.1, and the other corresponding, roughly, to the other three. The first way to begin a normative analysis of politics sees political theory as a philosophical discipline, and the other views political theory as an undertaking whose ultimate goal it is to describe how the way we structure our affairs today might be improved.
In his book Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer makes this division the starting-point of his own philosophical analyses of basic political concepts such as justice and equality:
One way to begin the philosophical enterprise – perhaps the original way – is to walk out of the cave, leave the city, climb the mountain, fashion for oneself (what can never be fashioned for ordinary men and women) an objective and universal standpoint. Then one describes the terrain of everyday life from far away, so that it loses its particular contours and takes on a general shape. But I mean to stand in the cave, in the city, on the ground. Another way of doing philosophy is to interpret to one’s fellow citizens the world of meanings that we share. Justice and equality can conceivably be worked out as philosophical artifacts, but a just or an egalitarian society cannot be. If such a society isn’t already here – hidden, as it were, in our concepts and categories – we will never know it concretely or realize it in fact.
(Walzer 1983:xiv)
Walzer’s second approach to begin the philosophical or normative enterprise is, basically, an attempt to get away from potentially intractable philosophical debates, and instead focus on how to make the world we live in more characterised by justice and equality. In light of this, one commentator has suggested that a “successful normative analysis is one that provides us with the most accurate interpretation of a set of shared meanings of the phenomenon to be studied”, and that it is an important task for the political theorist to “describe the practices
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and institutions that relates to the subject matter, and, more importantly, to discern people’s beliefs about those practices and institutions” (Semb 2000:13).
This points in the direction of a close alliance between political theory and social or political science. In order to improve the political arrangements by which we are surrounded, one must first know how these arrangements came about in the first place, how they are justified or grounded in various views about how our political affairs ought to be structured, and how and why our surroundings may come to approve or disapprove of suggestions for how to improve them. Only then could one begin to make normative arguments with a reasonable chance of success. Ultimately, one may be able to present a normative argument which goes all the way from a description of a political problem, via the formulation of how things ought to be and how thing might be improved, to a successful implementation of a reform proposal which aims to repair the identified problems, and thereby actually improve the political system under which we live.
A particularly embarrassing problem in normative political theory is, however, the lack of any widely recognised standards of success for a given normative argument. It is therefore not much one can say, at least at a general level, about the ‘methods’ employed in political theory or philosophy (Kymlicka 2002:5-7). There is simply not at present a general agreement as to when a reasonable or rational person should be convinced by any one normative argument about how our political and social affairs ought to be structured (cf.
Thorsen 2011a). Most of the efforts in political theory have consequently sought refuge within a larger political ideology or a tradition for normative political thought. Such traditions are in turn wrought with tacit assumptions often only discernible with great difficulty to the outsider, and often supplied with their own – often largely implicit – standards of argumentative excellence.
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This state of the discipline could probably be traced back to the obstinately intractable problem of what truth-functional properties a normative sentence might take on.
As for descriptive propositions, it seems implausible to claim that these could be completely indeterminate – they are, at least for all practical purposes, either true or false (cf. e.g. Taylor 1998). But in what sense could normative propositions be either true or false? In this question controversy has seeped in, making it an additional challenge to devise future methodological standards for political theory, or indeed for any type of normative enquiry, which would have a potential for becoming widely recognised (cf. Beauchamp 2001:57-98;
Malnes 2001; Thorsen 2011a).
It could of course be claimed that normative, political analysis is a hollow practice, and that one instead could and should participate in more fulfilling or productive tasks. It is however likely that only few people would condone such a position, at least if they are genuinely interested in improving the political arrangements under which we live. Instead, normative enquiry and evaluation of political affairs is a common phenomenon, both in academic debates and outside them. I will therefore in this study not attempt to justify the whole enterprise that is political theory, which is a task that might easily reach quite deterring proportions (cf. though Vincent 2004; Smits 2009:1-17).
The most basic aim of normative political analysis is quite simply to modify and improve our preceding beliefs and intentions, by developing some of them further and discarding others. That way, one might be able to identify, establish, and defend values and principles which ought to guide our answers to questions relating to how society ought to be organised (Smits 2009:3-4). A primary assumption is that it is possible to resolve if not all, then at least some of the difficult problems and conflicts we tend to think of as moral or political, by way of calm and rational enquiry and deliberation (Thorsen 2011). The question as to when enough has been said in order to justify any given political institution or
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arrangement remains, however, effectively in dispute. Instead, we must be contented with merely tentative methods and norms of argumentative success.
One such norm is of a formal nature and concerns itself with the mode of presentation of the normative theory we wish to describe and perhaps defend. A theory should be as complete as possible, in the sense that it does not leave vital parts of itself in the dark. Raino Malnes (2001) has suggested comprehensiveness and acuteness as virtues when it comes to presenting and systematising normative theories. This means, respectively, that as many ideas and arguments as possible which are relevant to the problem at hand are given due consideration, and that such relevant ideas and arguments are discussed in light of each other and according to their relative importance. In the study presented below, I will try to live up to these virtues because they are preconditions for clarity in any systematic enquiry, normative or otherwise, and that the flouting of these virtues seems necessarily to hurt all arguments by leaving natural questions unanswered. In this, they constitute a rudimentary methodology – a methodology that is unfinished, but inevitable if one is to make sense of normative political theory.
Another guiding norm which has gained some prominence in our day and age is constituted by the idea that an acceptable normative argument or theory should be in tune with our considered convictions or judgements about related matters. John Rawls, the modern instigator of this idea, has given this ideal the name “reflective equilibrium” (cf.
Rawls 1971:46-53). The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines reflective equilibrium as a
“state in which all one’s thoughts about a topic fit together; in which there are no loose ends or recalcitrant elements that do not cohere with an overall position” (Blackburn 2008). We naturally aim at greater levels of coherence in our beliefs, since holding contradictory or mutually exclusive beliefs would be intolerable for any person claiming to be rational. That any given normative theory coheres with our prior convictions and beliefs must, at least
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tentatively, be considered as an argument in favour of that theory. Conversely, if a normative theory, ethical or political, conflicts with our preceding sense of right and wrong or our
‘moral intuitions’, that in itself is an indication that the theory ought to be revised or perhaps abandoned altogether (Audi 1997).
But moral and political theory should not, either, be in the business of judging theories solely on the degree to which they lend support to our considered convictions about what ought to take place, or how society ought to be organised. Instead, moral and political theory might be considered to be what Rawls (1971:49) calls a ‘Socratic’ mode of enquiry, in which influence between general theories and considered convictions, or tentative answers to isolated questions of a normative nature, runs both ways. We may therefore, on closer inspection, want to discard some of our considered convictions if they turn out to be inconsistent with a normative argument or theory we find particularly attractive. A state of reflective equilibrium is thus achieved whenever our normative theories and considered convictions have been modified in light of each other, so that the theory is now in tune with the considered convictions we have not yet discarded, and vice versa.
A central goal of moral and political theory may thus be described as the search for inconsistencies between the normative theories we (or perhaps someone else) adhere to, and our considered convictions about what ought to take place, or how society ought to be organised. If we find such inconsistencies, we may proceed to the next stage, in which we try to decide which beliefs we ought to modify in order to achieve a state of reflective equilibrium. We may start our discussion of an inconsistency with a ‘narrow reflective equilibrium’ as our goal, and discuss whether we should revise or reject the normative theory in question, or if we instead should revise or reject the preceding considered convictions of ours, which we find to be in conflict with that theory (cf. e.g. Kymlicka 2002:6).
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We might however also aim at a state of affairs which is sometimes called ‘wide reflective equilibrium’, in which we also take into consideration various ‘background theories’ which may act as a standard to judge whether or not the normative theory in question is the best available theory (cf. Rawls 1974; Daniels 1979; 1996; 2011).
Background theories form what one perhaps may describe as an elusive category, but they may for instance include basic theories which we take more or less for granted, such as theories of human nature or general theories about how human societies work. Such theories may be hard to make explicit, but if we rely on them, as we normally do, we have at least the outline of a procedure for deciding whether we should abandon or revise a normative theory in light of considered convictions which come into conflict with it, or whether we instead should revise those convictions in light of the theory we have formulated.
The answer is simply that we should prefer those normative theories and those isolated ideas of ours about what ought to take place which form a more or less harmonious body of thought together, and which at the same time fit together with our background theories about how human beings and human societies work. A state of ‘wide reflective equilibrium’ is thus achieved whenever we have rooted out the inconsistencies which may arise between normative theories and isolated convictions about what ought to take place on one hand, and between normative theories and various ‘background theories’ on the other.
This is at least the beginning of a practical theory about which normative theories and convictions we should build our future policies on, and which of them we instead should abandon or revise (cf. especially Daniels 1996:333-352). But even if it is the beginning of a method for political theory, we are nevertheless some distance away from a method which gives us a straightforward procedure for how to do political theory in practical terms.
We may, however, delve even deeper into the matter if we consider what use we may have for a normative mode of enquiry such as political theory. Clearly, some of the problems
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that are usually dealt with under the heading of normative political theory are more susceptible to the development of practical research methods than others. We may as political theorists for instance want to assess a given political arrangement in light of some – more or less settled – normative theory or conviction. If we then, for the time being at least, move past discussions of a more foundational or philosophical nature, we may move closer to a kind of political theory with a more limited and practical purpose. We may for instance put aside philosophical discussions of what democracy actually is or whether or not democratic decision procedures are better than its alternatives, and instead move on to more practical discussions, for instance of how some specific institution or practice might be made more democratic, in accordance with a settled or traditional conception of democracy.
In order for political theory to become more practical in this way, political theorists may need the assistance of the social sciences in the form of various types of empirical research, or they may want to use concepts and categories developed by empirically oriented social scientists. Political theory itself will, however, at the same time become a more applied research discipline aimed at the assessment of existing political institutions or policy arrangements. Political theory of this kind will still be a characteristically normative discipline within social science, but it will also form a joint venture with empirical social research (cf. Thorsen 2008; 2011).
Political theorists might even use normative questions at a greater level of detail as points of departure for empirical research of their own, in order to address and clarify the normative problem at hand. That way, they may move from normative discussions to empirical research, and back again, until they have reached a set of conclusions which are both of a normative and an empirical nature about the problems with which they are concerned. For instance, they may want to know how one can make society more democratic, or how one can develop better strategies for a sustainable development of human
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societies. Potentially, this kind of more practical political theory may be guided by methodological standards – or at least ‘rules of thumb’ – to a greater degree, especially its more empirical components (cf. especially Lafferty 2002; cf. also Lafferty 1981; 2002a). At least, it would if we compared it with the kinds of political theory which are more preoccupied with the philosophical exploration and discussion of rather abstract political ideas and concepts.