"We do not want yo hear your story": political theory's nomological bias

The purpose of this article is to examine the undervalued and marginalized position of narratives in mainstream political theory today. Why are narratives an inferior way of thinking about normative issues? Why are they absent from predominant ways of answering normative questions about politics? This article argues that such an undervalued position can be best explained by the predominance of a nomological approach in mainstream political theory. By a nomological approach, I mean a preference for law-like statements (prescriptive laws, principles, norms, rules), so that questions about what we ought to do are answered nomologically. The all affected principle, the difference principle, the categorical imperative, or the laws of nature are examples of such law-like statements that are familiar to researchers in political theory. A preoccupation with these prescriptive laws— their origin, their justification, their legitimacy, their scope of application, their internal constituency, and their relationship to other principles—constitutes the primary focus of political theorists. The primacy of the nomological approach, I want to argue, downplays the value of narratives. The uneven and asymmetrical relationship that I want to highlight is one between laws and narrative. Narratives have an undervalued position in political theory because law-like formulations have a privileged position. The strength of the latter is relative to the weakness of the former and vice versa. I trace this nomological preference to the influence of positivist social science, analytic philosophy, and liberalism on the discipline of political theory. While these three stress different kinds of laws (causal laws, prescriptive laws, and formal legalism) they contribute to the nomological bias in political theory.