Political Theory Beyond the Text

Political theory is often presented as if it lives mainly in books. We imagine it in canonical texts, famous thinkers, and abstract arguments about justice, freedom, authority, democracy, or rights. That is not wrong. Political theory does live there. But when we act as if it lives only there, we narrow both the subject and the range of people who count as doing it.

At its best, political theory is not simply the study of a canon. It is reflection on how we should live together, why we should live one way and not another, and whether or not it is even possible to agree on an answer (Floyd 2017, p.46). If that is right, political theory is better defined by the questions it asks than by the literary form in which it materializes. Once we start from questions rather than from a fixed list of approved texts, the boundaries of the field begin to shift. Political theory no longer appears only in treatises and journal articles. It can also emerge in stories, myths, folk tales, songs, indigenous oral traditions (Watene, 2025), and other shared forms through which people make sense of power and collective life.

That matters because stories do not merely illustrate political ideas after the fact. They often carry them. A fable, myth, or folk tale can stage questions about rule and obedience, justice and punishment, order and disorder, freedom and dependency. Stories can dramatize dilemmas that political theorists later name more formally. They can encode assumptions about who belongs, whose suffering counts, and what forms of power are treated as normal. Narrative, then, is not just a decorative extra added to theory. It is one of the places where political reflection happens.

This becomes even more important once we ask whose voices historically have been excluded from universities and the institutions that authorise knowledge. Patricia Hill Collins makes this point in Black Feminist Thought, arguing that such thought often developed through ”music, literature, daily conversation and everyday behaviour” rather than conventional academic publication alone (2000 [1990], p.252). Where people are excluded from elite institutions, political reflection does not disappear; it takes other forms. If we define theory too narrowly, we risk confusing exclusion with absence, treating some traditions of reflection as theory and others as mere culture or experience.

That is one reason debates about decolonizing political theory matter. The issue is not only that the canon has omitted important voices. It is also that political theory has inherited too narrow a sense of the forms in which political thought can appear. As James Tully argues, de-parochializing political thought requires more than adding non-Western or marginalized thinkers to an existing list; it also requires reflection on the assumptions that determine what is allowed to count as theory in the first place (2016). Broadening the field, then, is not just about who is included. It is also about what genres, practices, and sources we regard as capable of carrying political insight.

Seen in this light, political theory is too often treated as a literary tradition first and a theoretical one second. If we define the subject by a limited set of formats — the monograph, the journal article, the canonical treatise — we risk mistaking one dominant way of doing political thought for the subject itself. If political theory is really concerned with questions of justice, authority, conflict, freedom, and collective life, then it may appear in a wider range of forms than the academy has usually recognized.

That broader view changes not only what we read, but how we imagine political theory can be done. If stories can be sites of political reflection, then political theory may also be something we do, not only something we read. That is one reason I have become interested in live-action roleplay, or larp, as a way of approaching political ideas.

That can sound unusual at first, especially if roleplay is imagined as pure entertainment or escapism. But roleplay can also create structured environments in which participants confront political questions from within. It can place people inside conflicts over authority, compromise, competing loyalties, institutional rules, unequal power, or the costs of collective decision-making. Instead of standing outside these problems and analysing them in the abstract, participants encounter them as lived situations shaped by uncertainty, emotion, pressure, and consequence. I have argued that larp can function as a form of public political philosophy because it allows participants to inhabit moral and political disagreement rather than merely observe it from a distance (Stevens, 2025).

This is important because some features of political life are difficult to grasp through detached argument alone. We can explain that values conflict, institutions constrain action, and public decisions create winners and losers. But it is different to feel those pressures as part of a shared situation. Roleplay can make visible the burdens of office, the force of competing claims, and the fragility of trust. It can also show that politics is not simply a matter of deriving the right answer from the right principle. It often involves interpretation, uncertainty, conflict, and the need to act without final reassurance.

At a time of democratic strain, institutional distrust, and polarization, this matters. The big ideas of political theory are not abstract luxuries. They are part of how people make sense of power, obligation, conflict, and collective life. But if political theory is to matter publicly, it must become more confident in recognizing the wider range of forms through which people encounter and work through political questions.

Political theory still lives in books, then. But it also lives in stories, in oral and narrative traditions, and sometimes in enacted forms of shared imagination. With that suggestion comes a real risk: that every opinion, slogan, or viral claim begins to count as theory. Academia is increasingly shaped by excessive workloads, burnout, pressures to publish and perverse incentives of its own (Stevens, 2026), but academic publication still matters because it involves reflection on method and critical scrutiny. This is an important counterweight to a world of bots, algorithmic amplification, and organised hatred.

From this point of view, the risk becomes the answer. To reconsider what political theory is, is not just an exercise in inclusion, but one of drawing lines too, so that we can expose manipulation that masquerades as theory.

References
Collins, P. H. (2000 [1990]). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Floyd, J. (2017). Is Political Philosophy Impossible? Thoughts and Behaviour in Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stevens, S. (2025). Public Political Philosophy, Moral Sentimentalism and Larp. Public Humanities, 1(e162), 1-16. doi:10.1017/pub.2025.10079
Stevens, S. (2026). What Incentive Structures Do to Political Philosophy: Epistemic Pathologies and Institutional Design. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/01914537261438156
Tully, J. (2016). Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond: A Dialogue Approach to Comparative Political Thought. Journal of World Philosophies, 1, 51-74.
Watene, K. (2025). Pūrākau as Philosophy. In I. Robeyns (Ed.), Pluralizing Political Philosophy: Economic and Ecological Inequalities in Global Perspective (pp. 82-106). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/9780191994784.001.0001