‘Political theory, which presents itself as addressing universal and abiding matters … the truth about things as at bottom they always and everywhere necessarily are, is in fact and inevitably, a specific response to immediate circumstances’ (Geertz 2000: 218). Or so Clifford Geertz reminds us at the start of his recent summary of culture and politics in the post-1989 world. His scepticism towards the universal claims of political theory is not new. Radcliffe-Brown's dismissal of the state as a problem was part and parcel of a wholesale dismissal of the relevance of political philosophy to political anthropology, a position eagerly endorsed by his editors on that occasion (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940).

The problem for anthropology is not so much that theory remains covertly rooted in the particulars of its own political place and its own political time. Nor is it the lofty confusion of universal predicaments with local circumstances. (How could an anthropologist object to this?) Problems start to pile up when the naïve reader fails to identify the particular origins of a theoretical stance. Foucault's theoretical positions should seem weird to a reader ignorant of the political-intellectual world of 1960s Paris, and the twin shadows of the authoritarian French Communist Party (PCF), and the self-dramatizing figure of Jean-Paul Sartre, against whom so much of his work was directed. (Its subsequent smooth translation to Reagan's America in the 1980s is a mystery I leave for future intellectual historians.