In 5 pages this paper examines how political theorists develop their concepts and the influences of culture and society on them. Four sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: JL5_JLpoltheor.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
In order
to investigate the extent to which political theorists will be influenced by social and personal events in their lives, it is necessary to consider firstly the fact that ones personal
life is invariably itself influenced by social, cultural and political pressures. In other words, a political theorist, philosopher or other thinker cannot exist in a vacuum: their ideas may well
be radical and to a great extent original, but this is not to say that they remained unmoved by the forces of their social environment.
If we assert, for example, that a particular
thinker was strongly influenced in his analysis of human behavioural patterns by the fact that he spent many years in an unhappy marriage, this tells us not only that he
was particularly affected by the events of his personal life, but that the society in which he lived was one in which the marriage customs did not allow an individual
to remove themselves easily from an unhappy liaison.
This then raises the question of whether the marriage customs in question were the result of economic or religious practices, and how strongly these were
enforced, and so on. Therefore, all political theorists will to some extent be the product of their social and cultural environment, even though some may be able to transcend these