Modeling Interpretation and the Practice of Political Theory

Modeling Interpretation and the Practice of Political Theory addresses these questions of political theory in a refreshing and hands-on manner. It does not only model in the abstract, but also test in practice eight basic schemes of interpretation with which any ambitious reader of political texts should be familiar.

Martin Beckstein is Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His publications include The Politics of Economic Life (Routledge, 2015) and 'Political Conservation, or How to Prevent Institutional Decay' (2019). Ralph Weber is Professor of European Global Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He teaches the global

Introduction: A Typology of Interpretation in Political Theory 1. From Text to Argument: An Analytical Interpretation of the Federalist Paper No. 10 2. The Person Behind the Author: What Plato's Life Tells Us about the Statesman 3. What the Author also Authored: Understanding Olympe de Gouge's The Three Urns through Her Oevre 4. Speaking into the Context: Specifying the Illocutionary Potential of Diego Rivera's The History of Mexico 5. Subtexting: An Esoteric Interpretation of Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing 6. The Reader in Front of the Text: De-/Recontextualizing Huang Zongxi's Mingyi daifang lu 7. Reading the Readers:How the Meaning of Machiavelli's The Prince Changed before Its Publication 8. Tracing the Concept of Contract: Interpreting a Hittite Loyalty Oath for Conceptual History Epilogue: Eclecticism in Political Theory