Since the seventeenth century, at least, Western political philosophy has for the most part been articulated in terms of one or the other of two incompatible positions. One position would claim that there is some knowable, anterior, fundamentally ahistorical order which serves as standard, criterion, or guiding principle for political conduct. One this view, politics can reasonably aspire to being a science, in the classical sense of that term. Orthodox or scientific Marxism is an example of this position.