Neo-Aristotelianism in Contemporary Political Studies: Breaking the Spell of Modernity and Postmodernity

Abstract

For the last several centuries, the concept of modernity has furnished political philosophy and political science with an orientation toward the world that accepted modem natural science as the model for inquiry, and freedom as the governing norm of political life. Postmodernists often present themselves as enemies of modernity but are, 1 argue, simply more sophisticated modernists - they reject the modem devotion to scientific enlightenment as the only path to truth, but they retain an unexamined commitment to freedom as the central political norm and to democracy as the only legitimate political community. The Neo-Aristotelian naturalism I propose is not a new paradigm, but a way of thinking about the modernist and postmodernist paradigms we have too often accepted as inevitable. It is critical rather than programmatic or doctrinal. What I am after here is a way of thinking about what we are doing that is open to critique and revision in a way that modernism and postmodernism are not.