Some humor:

Thanks to having served on a large number of search committees for post-docs and junior candidates, I have now have a pretty good sense of what the five most common types of dissertations are in political philosophy. Here they are, categorized, with abstracts included:

1. The Disciple. “Hey, did you know my advisor hasn’t written about topic X? My dissertation explores what I think my advisor would say about X, except that I’m less talented or polished than she is, so this is more like a crappy version of what she might have come up with. Enjoy!”

2. Oh, Good, Another Piece on Rawls. “Footnote 458 of A Theory of Justice has not been sufficiently explored. Buckle up for 300 pages of exploration!”

3. Splitting the Difference. “Famous philosopher A argues X. Famous philosopher B argues not-X. In this dissertation, I argue the truth is somewhere in-between.”

4. Incomprehensible Kantian Nonsense. “I’m going to argue that some policy P is justified on Kantian grounds. This argument will take 75 steps, and will read as if it’s been translated, or, rather, partially translated, from 19th century German. It will also be completely implausible, and so, to non-Kantians, will simply read like a reductio of Kant rather than a defense of P.”

5. Consequentialism without Social Science. “I’m going to argue that policy P is justified on consequentialist grounds. It didn’t occur to me to examine what political scientists or economists have to say about how P would actually work. I sure hope there won’t be one in the room if you interview me, because they’ll be able to tear my dissertation apart in five seconds. Heck, an astute undergrad majoring in either subject could do that. I’m counting on you hiring committee members to know nothing about institutions and instead to rely on your unexamined biases.”

Political theory:

The five major types of dissertations in political theory include both 1 and 3 above, but also the following three new types:

6. Incomprehensible Postmodernist Garbage: “This dissertation examines the ontic-ontological ontology of late capitalist crises through the agonistic hyperrealist lens of soda dispensers and Fall Out Boy lyrics.”

7. I Ran Out of Actual Political Theorists to Study and So Decided to Write About This Instead. “I want to do intellectual history, but pretty much every major political thinker in the West has been studied to death. But, hey, I realized no one’s written a dissertation on the political theory of Chaucer, so here ya go. What, you say, Chaucer doesn’t actually have a political theory? He’s just a poet? Well, you must be a philistine with an overly narrow conception of political theory.”

8. Straussian Esotericism: “Here are three hundred pages written about the first two pages of Locke’s third letter to his second foot doctor. My dissertation does not defend any recognizable thesis, nor is it a piece of exegesis. Non-Straussians will have no clue what I’m doing. However, other Straussians will recognize it as deep.”

UPDATE: Someone asked me which kind of dissertation I had. I’d say #1.