Over the past weeks I’ve been doing three things bearing on the questions above. First, I’ve been explaining to my new colleagues, in a university without a philosophy department, what on earth it is that I do. Second, I’ve been writing and preparing to teach three political philosophy modules pretty much from scratch. Three, I’ve been getting ready to guide political theory students on a very broad political methods course. One of the things I’m keen to do is to give political theory students enough material to be able to explain their method when it comes to writing their dissertations; I’ve found over the years that this is something that students really struggle with (and not just political theory ones). While thinking about these topics I’ve read quite a lot of really useful texts on the subject, so I thought I’d turn them into a political theory methods reading list. So, here it is below – hopefully of some use to somebody.
The: ‘What is Political Philosophy?’ Reading List:
Brooks, Thom. ‘In Defence of Political Theory: Impact and Opportunities’. Political Studies Review 11, no. 2 (1 May 2013): 209–15. 007.
———. ‘What Is the Impact of Political Theory?’ Political Studies Review 13, no. 4 (1 November 2015): 500–505.
Brownlee, Kimberley and Stemplowska, Zofia (2016 – forthcoming) ‘Trapped in an Experience Machine with a Famous Violinist’ in Methods in Analytical Political Theory . Adrian Blau (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (draft version here)
Cohen, G. A. ‘How to Do Political Philosophy’. In On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, edited by Michael Otsuka. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Holland, Ben. ‘Political Theory and the Impact Agenda’. Political Studies Review 13, no. 4 (1 November 2015): 471–73.
McDermott, Daniel. ‘Analytical Political Philosophy’. In Political Theory, edited by David Leopold and Marc Stears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. [chapters 2 and 3 of this book are also very useful]
Pettit, Philip. ‘Analytical Philosophy’. In A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas W. Pogge, 2nd ed. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
Plamenatz, John. ‘The Use of Political Theory’. Political Studies 8, no. 1 (1 February 1960): 37–47.
Rawls, John. ‘Introduction: Remarks on Political Philosophy’. In Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, edited by Samuel Freeman. Massachutsetts: Belknap Press, 2008.
Steve Cooke 