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POLITICAL POLITICAL THEORY: ESSAYS ON INSTITUTIONS. By Jeremy Waldron. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. xi + 403 pp.
Political theory is a field that continues to hold little sway in the discipline. The 2007 decision by the department of political science at Pennsylvania State University to eliminate political theory from those subfields available for graduate student training provoked an outcry that has all but abated. No drastic reformulation of the mission of the subfield-if there ever was an explicit one in the first place-has emerged justifying its position alongside American, comparative, and international politics. As Andrew Rehfeld (2010) has noted, "Theorists are often marginalized within their departments, their contributions to the general disciplinary journals have an 'odd man out' quality to them, and their scholarship is often treated as trivial" (466). So what steps might be taken to make theory more respectable within the discipline, beyond the glib suggestion to "be more relevant"?
In the collection of essays comprising Political Political Theory, Jeremy Waldron believes he has an approach to political thought that will elevate the field's status just in the nick of time. His solution: shift the attention of political theory to questions of institutional design, structure, and process and away from the abstract normative questions of justice and equality. For too long, he believes, political theory has titled too far toward philosophy and not enough toward "questions about political process, political institutions, and political structures" that govern and regulate everyday politics (3). Correcting this imbalance is his motive in writing Political Political Theory and, indeed, it characterizes Waldron's scholarly output in general. As he puts it in chapter 1, there is life beyond John Rawls, "beyond the abstract understanding of liberty, justice, and egalitarianism," if only political theorists will renew their engagement with the "old institutional questions" that long ago fell by the wayside (ix).
The book was put together during Waldron's tenure as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, a position that was also held by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, who believed the study of political theory is foremost concerned with higherorder questions concerning the "ends of political action," is Waldron's foil throughout the book (3). Waldron's criticism of Berlin is not simply that his "airy talk...