Methodology in Political Philosophy: The case for clarity

How many methods are there in political philosophy? This is a surprisingly tricky question, in large part because it’s unclear what ‘method’ one would use for counting them. Just as we talk loosely of judgements, intuitions, convictions, and sentiments, when justifying political principles, we also talk loosely of approaches, methods, techniques, and even strategies, when it comes to explaining the choices we make in both that justificatory task and others. In this paper, I argue that the route to methodological clarity here is to think first in terms of tasks and then in terms of methods. In other words, we need first to work out the distinctive tasks we are involved in, as political philosophers, and then ponder which methods are available for those tasks. On this view, political philosophy is defined by a task or set of tasks, with particular methods then available or unavailable to us according to whether they serve those tasks. Relatedly, a method counts as a method if it is a generalizable form of reasoning that can be applied to one or more tasks. We might then say that ‘justifying political principles’ is a task, whilst ‘testing principles against considered judgements’ is a method available for that task. Or we might say that ‘analysing political concepts’ is a task, whilst ‘thought experiments’ are a method available for that task. The pay-off for getting the concepts and categories right here is at least twofold. First, moving towards a clearer common language, and thus a shared playbook, should help us make better choices when it comes to the way we plot our arguments. Second, such clarity might reveal that at least some of our arguments about the right ‘methods’ stem from our working on distinctive ‘tasks’. In time, we might then judge those previously rivalrous tasks as separate but worthwhile endeavours. Or, if we are lucky, we might even see them as complementary projects towards a common end.