1. The Absence of Empirical Sciences from Political Philosophy
In 1956 Peter Laslett announced the death of political philosophy, if only "for the moment", because he assumed that a particular tradition in intellectual life had been broken. The tradition was "to apply the methods and the conclusions of contemporary thought to the evidence of the contemporary social and political situation" (Laslett 1956, vii). According to Laslett, logical positivism was the culprit responsible for the demise of political philosophy. Indeed, the influence of logical positivism had been devastating in some respects. For instance, Tho- rnas D. Weldon's influential book The Vocabulary of Politics, published in 1953 added a fierce assault on the already anxious nature of normative theorising in political philosophy at that time (see also Easton 1951; cf. Ball 1995). Logical positivism deemed normative statements unverifiable and separated by an un- bridgeable gap from descriptive, especially scientific, discourse. Hence the only proper task of political philosophers would have seemed to be logical analysis of words used in politics. If political theory had been using non-normative me- thods, political philosophers probably could have ignored the logical positivists critique, but obviously that wasn't the case. In fact, Laslett nicely summarises the common viewpoint: "Since political philosophy is, or was, an extension of ethics, the question has been raised whether political philosophy is possible at all." (Laslett 1956, ix So it was mainly normative political theory that became problematised (Vincent 2004, 91ff.). Although I doubt that political philosophy
The idea of conceiving political philosophy as applied ethics has recently been forcefully criticised by Geuss 2008. See also Newey 2001.