Introduction

      Over fifty years ago, Robert Dahl argued that the difficulty with “traditional” or “normative” political theory, what seems to make it more akin to literary criticism, for example, than scientific analysis (1958, 97–98), is that it can “rarely, if ever, meet rigorous criteria of truth” (95). Dahl’s main point was not that he himself knew the criteria in question and knew, as a result, that they could not be met by political theory (cf. 97); it was that, so far as he could see, political theorists themselves had not made a serious effort to spell out the kind of evidence from which they take their bearings or the criteria on the basis of which they evaluate it. And in the absence of a serious effort along those lines, political theory necessarily suffers from a degree and kind of “vagueness” hardly compatible with an aspiration to be counted among the (social) sciences (97). Dahl demanded, therefore, that political theorists say with some “high degree of precision what would constitute a fair test of a political theory” (95, 97, 98).

      On the other hand, in a seminal work that, according to one later assessment of it, more than any other in the 1960s “summed up the frustrations and hopes of the contemporary political theorists” (Scaff 1980, 1155; Gunnell 2006, 772) in the face of the behavioralists’ objections, Sheldon Wolin made a case against truth that is “rigorous, precise, and quantifiable” in favor of “tacit political knowledge,” as Michael Polanyi first put it (1964), which is none of these things (1969, 1069–77, cf. 1063). By Wolin’s own account, tacit political knowledge and the criteria of evaluating it—that is, “[judgments] about the nature and perplexities of politics” and “judgments about the adequacy and value of theories and methods” (1077)—are indeed vague. Tacit political knowledge, he said, “is elusive and hence meaningful statements about it often have to be allusive and intimative. … Knowledge of this type tends, therefore, to be suggestive and illuminative rather than explicit and determinate” (1070). And the criteria of evaluating “the forms of theory built upon [tacit political knowledge]” (1071) are not less “elusive” than tacit political knowledge itself. “A certain sensibility is needed, qualities of thinking and feeling which are not readily formulable but pertain to a capacity for discriminative judgment” (1076, emphasis added). If tacit political knowledge is “elusive” and if, when it comes to the evaluation of it, “appropriateness of judgment cannot be encapsulated into a formula” (1076), it is indeed hard to see how what Wolin went so far as to call “the creation of theories” (1073) does not, as Dahl and others objected, fall into “the domain of literary criticism, where the study of the ‘meaning’ of a poem generally does not, even at the hands of the new critics, lead to an agreed interpretation” (1958, 97). Wolin, of course, did not think it did. But instead of articulating, “in rather careful language” (Dahl 1958, 97), the evidence or criteria on the basis of which tacit political knowledge or a theory founded on it could be sharply and exactly distinguished from “false, vague, unreliable, or even ‘mystical’” opinion (1071) or from mere “bias”—to which, even he himself granted, it surely has “a family resemblance” (1074)—Wolin seemed to argue that this could not and hence need not be done. Instead of doing so himself, at any rate, he (merely) gave eloquent and impassioned expression to the fact that there is something vague in the very nature of political