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A reader writes in:
My area of specialization is political philosophy and I have seen philosophers who work on and publish in analytic philosophy journals in the politics or political science departments of different universities. Do any cocooner’s have any insights on how they were able to tailor their job applications to work not just for jobs in philosophy but jobs in politics departments?
Good question! Do any readers have any helpful tips?
My (poorly informed) sense is that you need to convince the quants in the department that you’re at least as useful as a straight-up political theorist. So: what do you bring to the table? Can you teach a good range of intro courses? Can you teach quantitative methods? Can you contribute to or win grants? Are you publishing in policies outlets and presenting at APSA?
And is your PhD from a CHYMPS department? Obviously, the philosophy department hierarchy is different, but my sense is that political scientists care an awful lot about CHYMPS degrees.
So I think in top departments there really is very little difference and you only need to show you can publish in generalist journals like APSR. So if you are at a very top and recognized school in political philosophy, I’d encourage you to apply to top jobs. Same with people in PPE of course.
But as you get toward more teaching institutions the hurdle gets higher. Political theory’s canon as well as method of teaching can be quite different. For instance their intro classes are always historically based, involve lots of primary text and they also expect you to teach figures not in our canon such as Machiavelli, Constant, Burke, Marx, Hegel’s “philosophy of right” and Foucault.
One thing that’s totally out of one’s control once one applies, but I know for a fact that does help if you can spin it in the right way, is if you were lucky enough to do an undergrad that had a “great books” program.
A final thing I’d say is as bad as the philosophy market is, the political theory market seems to be worse. I say this because philosophy at least still has some sort of top tier, middle class and lower tier. Political theory still has it’s top tier, but there seems to be less and less of a middle class (and those jobs seem to be taken by what Michel called CHYMPS people) while at the lower tiers, these are departments who are trying to up their prestige as a “science” and who are filled with “quant” people who find political theory less relevant. So when PT people retire, those positions aren’t getting filled with theorists but other fields in poli sci.
“Policies outlets” above was meant to read “political science outlets”.
So if I understand correctly, it’s necessary to publish in political theory journals (and not just say, PPA) to be competitive for these jobs?
I don’t know that it’s necessary, but it would certainly make a difference if you had a solo pub in APSR, for example.
It’s probably easier for a philosopher to get hired in a polisci department than the other way around. But imagine if you were a political scientist trying to get work in a philosophy department, but with no pubs in philosophy journals (just, say, co-authored quant stuff in polisci outlets). You’d have a rough time of it.
There are big differences between different countries here. In the UK for jobs advertised as political theory, I would apply just like you would apply for a political philosophy job. Most places in the UK have political theory groups that are more or less entirely populated by philosophers. It can help to substitute the word “theory” for “philosophy” when describing your work, but that is more or less it.
I have less experience with politics departments in the US, but would expect there to be a larger gap unless you work on the history of political philosophy.
My sense, like some others above, is that it is easier for a philosopher to get hired as a political theorist than the other way around. However, that being said, I think it is not very easy.
A few considerations:
First, the political theory market has shrunk far more significantly than the philosophy market. Many departments don’t really have theorists, or don’t have more than one (so you might be operating alone).
Second, political theory, insofar as it exists, is a field far more divided in many ways than philosophy (perhaps a shrinking pie issue). Very top departments (Princeton, Harvard, Chicago) basically do, or at least have folks who do, analytic political philosophy, with (maybe) a very slightly different set of presumed shared canonical texts. A philosopher applying to those places could, I think, basically operate as themselves and pieces in PAPA, Ethics, etc would be extremely highly regarded and in many cases sufficient on their own (insofar as anything is). But lower level departments are not always interested in analytical work and may therefore be far more suspicious of philosophers. They may look more to political science style journals- APSR, Political Theory, and want to imagine that somebody can speak to and fill in different gaps (teach a random comparative politics class, talk to people who do game theory). That means that to hope for success you may need both to be able to speak to non-analytic types AND to empirical/quantitative scholars. And that’s presuming their are jobs in teh first place.
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