I have read practically everything that Machiavelli has written. There is not one thing that he wrote that can even be considered an attempt at "theory" either in the way the word is misused by "Critical Theory" or in the sense of a scientific theory.
But this should not be surprising. The same can be said of Galileo.
There might exist "political theorists" in this world but where is there such a thing as "a theory of politics" that is worthy the name theory? Unlike physics, we need no special training to understand politics or history. We do not need "a theory" to understand the political world, though a strong "world view" within an historical tradition, worked through with other people is a necessity.
It is kind of amusing. This is an old argument from Athenian democracy. Plato through Socrates argued that in order to understand politics a person needed "special" knowledge. From what we can gather from other sources (speeches in court, etc.) the Athenian citizen seemed to believe that there was no "speical knowledge" of politics, that in fact the very idea of "speical knowledge" in the world of politics was an elite world view. To put it today's terms, there are no political theories as such, only pretenses to theory. What can be understood in politics can be understood by all without special training. Normal social organizing will do.
> You can call them "theories" if you wish also, but they don't seem to me
> > to have the explanatory power of Quantum Mechanics or evolutionary
> > biology.
>
> Of course not. Those are theories of natural science. The world of
> meaning doesn't work that way. Science got its whole start by excluding
> intensions and interpretations and focusing entirely on forces --- a good
> idea when studying the nature world, which is made up of matter of forces,
> and where the existence of beings with wills was an illusion. But you
> can't do that with people. In the world of meanings, interpretation is
> everything. So everything's always disputable.
>
> Michael
I basically agree with Jerry Fodor and Julius Moravcsik (and from what I uderstand even Heidegger and strangely enough Althusser): Where there is human intention and human meaning there is no scientific theory. "Intention" and "meaning" themselves are paradoxes and in order to produce a workable theoretical model, it is necessary to exclude them. Theory is basically anti-humanist or it doesn't work. What we call meaning and what we call "intention" is inscrutable from the point of view theory.
Luckily, so very little human knowledge is understood by "theoretical projects," whether successful or unsuccessful, that we shouldn't have to worry that the quantity and quality of our knowledge will be harmed for a lack of a theory.
What should be critiqued is the need, the desire, to name intellectual projects "theories". The fear is that if a project is not "theoretical" then there is no knowledge.
Bertrand Russell once wrote:
"To scientific common sense ... it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. _Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occruence might, from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection._"
Similarly I would say: "Socially and causally, theory is an unimportant feature of human culture; a way of thinking that omitted to mention 'theory' when studying human culture, might suffer only from a very trivial imperfection." Further, of all human knowledge, that part of human knowledge that we call theory is only a very small sliver of the life of the knowing mind. For practically all of human existence the phenomena that is "theory" did not exist at all and yet for some reason, today, among that small part of humanity that does its work in the intellectual worlds of philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, and politics "having a theory" is what you do as a prelude to writing a book or giving a lecture.
l
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-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/