The ‘Archival Turn’ in Political Theory: Towards an Ethnographic Sensibility

• In Event: The History of Ideas and Conceptual Change

Abstract

The use of archival material is becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary political theory – recent work on Rawls (Hawi, 2016; Forrester, 2019), Foucault (Elden, 2021; Behrent, 2023), Arendt (Hill, 2021), or Habermas (Verovšek, forthcoming), for instance, heavily draw on unpublished material to offer renewed perspectives on the political theories examined. Picking up on the trend, Alexander Livingstone launched a seminar series on “The Archival turn in political theory” at Cornell in 2021. Archival research was also instrumental in my own study of Sheldon Wolin’s political thought (Ruchet, 2023), in which I challenge the generally accepted idea that Wolin’s career was characterized by “a journey from liberalism to democracy.” Most existing reflections on the role of archives in political science research, however, tend to concentrate on comparative politics or political behavior (Skemer, 1991; Frisch at al., 2012; Lee, 2014; Sobotić, 2021) and very little exists concerning political theory (for an exception, see Hazareesingh & Nabulsi, 2008). This contribution aims to participate in filling that gap. It asks what the different methods used by the authors of these texts are, what different sets of practices drawing on archives can induce, and what the results have been in the different texts cited. Attention to the archive seems to proceed from a different kind of reflexivity (B. Zacka speaks of an ‘ethnographic sensibility’) which I explore in the paper, addressing the ethics of archival research in political theory.

Author

• Olivier Ruchet, University of Zurich