For much of its history in the twentieth century, analytic philosophy retreated from ethical and political engagement into meta-ethics, at least before the resurgence of interest in applied and normative ethics of the early 1970s: the influential journal Philosophy and Public Affairs was first published in 1971, as was Rawls's landmark A Theory of Justice, and Peter Singer's Animal Liberation was published in 1975. Some have seen this abdication as a partial explanation for the success of analytic philosophy in the United States during McCarthyism (see John McCumber's Time in the Ditch), although it is worth noting that, despite or because of their rather coercive theories of meaning, the logical positivists were leftist and often politically engaged in their personal lives. On the continental side, philosophers have perhaps more regularly got their hands dirty in sociopolitical matters, often co-imbricating philosophical and sociopolitical reflections, whether it be with Nazism (in Heidegger's case), or with a generally critical relation to totalitarianism, modernity and capitalism. Bergson, Beauvoir, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (the latter three set up Les temps modernes), Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and others have all been heavily involved in ethico-political matters, continuing a certain French tradition of the engaged public intellectual that derives from Voltaire and Zola, among others.

It seems to us that enshrined in analytic and continental political philosophy are two (perhaps more) competing ways of treating the political. Ethico-political reflection in the continental tradition tends to conceive of the political very broadly and such that philosophical interventions, even artistic and stylistic innovations, are always also political interventions (see, for example, Ranciere's influential book The Politics of Aesthetics).