Political Theory, Styles and Problems

proposal contextualises and challenges the nature and importance of that divide. Four Styles of Dealing with ProblemsDonahue and Ochoa Espejo identify four 'styles of dealing with intellectual problems' in contemporary political theory.6) The four styles are solving, pressing, resolving and dissolving a problem.They define 'style' as 'a repetition of patterning that results from a series of choices made within a set of constraints.'7) Their answer to the question 'why theorise?' is, thus, that we theorise in order to deal with problems: 'All inquiry, we argue, and certainly all theorising or philosophising, is a wrestling with intellectual problems.'8) When solving a problem, political theorists are 'offering an answer to the problem's question while providing reasons for thinking that the answer is correct'.9) Their examples of solving a problem include Jean-Jacques Rousseau's solution to the problem of legitimacy in The Social Contract; 10) Jürgen Habermas's conceptualisation of the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy; 11) and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.12) The latter is a particularly good example.Rawls solved the problem 'what is justice?' by determining a procedure that will tell us once and for all what justice is, and he provided an elaborate justification for the procedure.Later -in Political Liberalism and other places -he modified his solution, but that did not change the intent, which was to close once and for all the problem of 'what is justice?'.13) The theorist who presses a problem 'first poses an intellectual problem, and