The Impact of Political Theory John Dunn University of Cambridge Any systematic understanding of politics requires theory: an organised, if not necessarily self-conscious way of seeing and thinking about it. The point of studying and teaching about politics in universities is educational: to help others to understand it better and bring that understanding into their own lives and the lives of the communities to which they belong. Political theorists have a distinctive responsibility to recognise this and show those they teach and those with whom they work how to generate and organise better understanding of why politics is as it is and what it means for everyone’s life. The competitive rating of performance to secure university funding deploys criteria that are intellectually absurd, politically disgraceful or deeply corrupting of intellectual and educational purpose. Whatever else they have managed to add to political understanding by their own work, every academically employed political theorist ought at least to have shown those they teach unmistakably why that is so. Keywords: political theory; realism; impact; political education; global political thought It is hard to imagine anyone consigning a life to studying political theory unless they hoped not merely to enhance their own understanding of political life, but also to affect in some measure how others understand politics too. It would barely be decent to consign a life to teaching others about politics unless you hope to enhance the way they understand it in their turn. What is necessarily forlorn and foolish is to dream of affecting them only as you yourself would welcome, with the full wisdom of hindsight, and if necessary from beyond the grave. (There is indeed some degree of wish-fulfilment even in the hope of affecting yourself principally in ways you would prospectively or retrospectively welcome.) Politics is a peculiarly unsuitable subject matter to select for study if you hope to affect other people only in ways you happen to like. This is so because of its profound ontological elusiveness, its formidable recalcitrance to reasonably edifying purpose, its immense practical importance in shaping the conditions of human existence, and its sometimes treacherous response to the hopes which human beings endlessly feed into it (Dunn, 2000). On the other hand, no one could sanely settle down to trying to affect others, however gratifying their own gains in understanding might prove, in ways they would deeply regret. One element of what political theorists study is at first sight encouragingly determi- nate. Almost all of them study principally what other figures now conceived as political theorists have said in the past, or what their contemporary professional colleagues are currently in the habit of saying. This is as ontologically determinate as political subject matters come: just words in a particular language or languages arranged in a given order, and in the second case well within comfortably parochial view and all too distinct hearing. But even it destabilises quite rapidly as a subject matter when you ask what it really means or what the persons who have written it meant, or what those who are now apt to say it mean to convey when they do (Dunn, 1969; 2011). Human beings can do a lot of different things with words (Austin, 1962) and it is idle to expect their repertoires POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2015 VOL 13, 494–499 doi: 10.1111/1478-9302.12096 © 2015 The Author. Political Studies Review © 2015 Political Studies Association