This long post by Jacob Levy at The Volokh Conspiracy on Political Philosophy and Political Theory (April 15, 8.10am) is very good. I missed it when it was first posted.

I can basically confirm what Jacob says here about political philosophers and political theoriestsin the modern liberal academy. He says

"The two groups study much the same questions, read and write for much the same journals, and attend many (not all) of the same conferences. They are intellectual next-door neighbors; to mix metaphors, the wall between the humanities and the social sciences distinction is very thin at this point. But they have different institutional homes."

They are different institutional homes. Philosophy.com comes out of a philosophy department rather than a political science/theory department. It was a philosophy department dominated by Anglo-American philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and epistemology and which had little contact with the political theoriests in the political science department even though they read the same texts----Kant, Hegel, Marx etc. The concern in the Anglo-American philosophy department was with the rigor of 'the argument' above all else, and the political theoriests (like the literary theoriests) were looked down upon because their argument was weak.

Of course the latter argued. This argument stuff is all about gatekeeping since continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida were also dismissed because they did not argue. It was the gatekeeping that created the narrow insular world that deflected all the cross overs in the humanities (and affirmed the cross overs between philosophy and the natural sciences).

Jacob gives another way the distinction works. He says that:

"Given the structure of American doctoral programs, this means that a political theorist and a political philosopher-- even if they have complete overlap in their core interests-- will be differently trained. The philosopher will almost certainly study formal logic, very likely study ethics and moral philosophy broadly rather than political philosophy narrowly (and, often, legal philosohy as well), and study at least some topics from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaethics. The theorist may well take statistics and/or formal theory (i.e. rational choice and game theoretic mathematical models). The theorist will certainly study one or more of American politics, comparative politics, and international relations in some depth, and may also study American or comparative constitutional law."

It's very true. What ithis means in practice is that political theorists are more interested in the history of political thought than are political philosophers. When Anglo-American political philosophers turn to the history of political thought, they do so to extract an argument, not to study a particular person or group of persons, set of influences, or the historical context. It is the argument not the history that is of concern.

What Jacob does not detail is the reaction that has taken place to this modernist Anglo-American philosophy from the 1980s. This is a key concern as it lead to the embrace of continental philosophy and the analytic/continental divide. becames far more important and the political philosophy/political theory divide fades. The latter distinction only remains a crucial one within the horizons of Anglo-American high culture. As Chris Bertram over at observes "real difference between the two environments is, I suspect, as much a matter of who you have lunch with, go to the pub with after the seminar and so on." Even then, American and British cultures give the distinction a different feel, as Tom Runnacles observes here.

My reaction as a grad student reading Hegel was one of recoil to Anglo-American philosophy. That recoil saw me take the history turn (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is the crucial text), situate myself within the Frankfurt School, then read the texts of continental philosophy from the perspective of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. The abiding concern was to find as a way out of the analytic bottle and to find a different way to write philosophy. The Continental philosophical tradition provided a doorway. the Anglo-Continental divide becames far more important, and the political philosophy/political theory divide faded.

Jacob's putting the anglo-american/ continental distinction to one side is taken up by Russell Arben Fox.(Tuesday, April 15, 2003) It is important to do this. What was deeply resisted in the philosophy department was introducing texts by Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, Hannah Arendt, along with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno and Jurgen Habermas. What we have here is the philosophical background to the cultural wars that have their source in the analysis of cultural predicament of American liberal society articulated by Allan Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind (1987). It is here that we find the conservative charge of the nihilism of a New Left that had drank too deeply from the Nietsche/Heidegger tradition of continental philosophy. Behind Bloom, of course, lies Leo Strauss.

This deep resistance made it Anglo-American philosophy department, despite the undergraduate courses on Hegel and Marx and dialectics. The resistance was because they were not really doing philosophy and if they were doing philosophy some of the time they just plain wrong. That was known without reading any of the texts----apart from dipping into Rorty who was dismissed as a frivolous litterati spinning cocktail chit chat.

As Mathew Yglesias comments this analytic/continental divide was a bit of a furphy. What he says about the division between Anglo-American and "continental" philosophy is interesting and useful. He says the distinction is misleading:

"....because many (most?) of the progenitors of so-called "analytic" philosophy were Germans or Austrians -- Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Popper, etc. Rather, I think what you're looking at is the anti-historicism that's been adopted by most English-speaking departments as part of the quest to put philosophy on the secure path of a science."

He's dead right. The key to the conception of philosophy as a science goes back to Hobbes. What we find in the texts of Hobbes is the rejection of the rhetorical tradition and the turn to a scientific philosophy based on system building theory, a foundation of a few axioms and deductive reasoning. So the recoil from analytic philosophy is from a particular conception of philosophy---one based on mathematics and natural science (physics)---to finding another way of writing philosophy.

Hence the significance of Wittgenstein's therapeutic conception of philosophy: it enables us to find our way out of the analytic flybottle.