Your replies are thoughtful and thanks for that but I think you miss part of the point. My argument is not with the colloquial uses of the term "theory" but rather with the institutional politics of the terms misuse in scholarly disciplines and with its misuse by extra-scholarly social and cultural movements. This misuse is largely determined by an anxiety of legitimacy.
So consider the following thinkers: Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Hobbes. Would any of these thinkers have considered themselves "theorists" in the modern sense of the word? Did they develop any "theories" at all? When asking this question only Aristotle might have stepped up to the plate, because what in fact he was doing, and believed he was doing, was a kind of "taxonomy" that would lead to knowledgable conclusions. But whether you use the word "thoery" in the way of the natural sciences or in the way a political science textbook might use it, none of these philosophical thinkers would recognize the term as having anything to do with their projects.
Machiavelli was an historian and a great writer and observer, but it should be obvious from his commentaries on Livy that the patterns he saw in history were not meant to be put together into a theoretical model but were rather something that we would call today a "hermeneutics." He was interested in interpreting history in a humanistic way, as if it could be read as a narrative. Hobbes, was not interested in developing "a theory" but rather to "ground" political authority and sovereignty in a way that almost seems ontological. Spinoza's political thinking is interesting and original, but his own project was to find a meta-theological justification for the rule of the multitude. It was not political theory.
When these thinkers are described by the term "political theory" a certain misreading of their work is inevitable. We misunderstand what they are aiming for. Further the use encourages professors, writers and students to derive (attempted) "theoretical models" from their work ex post facto. There is a small workforce that gathers around such misreadings.
So why use the word "theory" at all to describe such thinkers, writers and philosophers? The history of it has as much to do with the establishment of modern academic disciplines into separate departments than it does with an interest in learning. The history of it is related to the fact that "natural philosophy" divided into several separate vibrant disciplines, or sciences. It was no longer enough to simply be a writer, a thinker, an interpreter, or a mere philosopher. Such thinkers could no longer justify themselves by way of God and theology or authority and the Sovereign. They needed separate disciplines that were grounded in the scientific outlook. This is a bourgeois ideology that it is necessary to critique and part of that critique is the use of the term "theory" and the proliferation of non-scientific "theories."
As far as the use of the word "theory", I am not sure why it shouldn't be used more carefully in academic and scholarly discussions and writings than whe it is used in everyday speech. In scholarly discussions much of what goes by the name of theory is not theoretical at all but simply a puffed up name for interpretation, description, methodology, a "scientific outlook" that seeks verification, philosophy, or system making. We should expect that people who are trained to write and think would use words more carefully and apply to them some circumspection in relation to their own disciplines.
I want to thank you Michael for engaging the discussion with some seriousness.
Jerry
On 5/31/08, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> So obviously there are different kinds of theory. The natural science
> kind, and the other kind. Or several other kinds.
>
> You seem to want to say the natural science kind is the only kind, and no
> one can legally use the word theory to describe any of the other kind.
> That seems unnecessary -- the modifier "scientific" makes the distinction
> you want to make as clearly as you could want to make it -- and
> humpty-dumptyist: the whole world uses the word theory differently, and
> you're not going to stop them.
>
> The whole world also already accepts this distinction. There are
> departments of political theory all over the world, and they all consider
> Machiavelli a political theorist, and none of them would have any
> hesitation in accepting that there is a fundamental different between
> political theory the theories of natural science.
>
> Now since the original query was whether there was anything useful in Mao;
> which transformed into the question of whether he could be considered to
> have made any contributions to military or political theory; this entire
> distinction seems irrelevant. Nobody ever asked if he made contributions
> to natural science.
>
> You seem to be arguing that political theory and military theory are not
> natural sciences. I don't know who you're arguing with, though. This
> seems like breaking down an open door.
>
> Michael
>
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>
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
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