Managed this weekend to get into a couple of debates with various fellow grad students about the merits of context when reading a work of political theory. I'm not exactly a hard-core Straussian (despite that being the first question I pretty much always got asked on that one evening with the ICPSR people before I came down here)--contextual elements, with the right text, are occasionally quite illuminating--but one's analysis, I believe, has to begin and end with what's in the text*.
My general analogy when having this argument is to something that frequently got told to me in the art history classes (was actually first told to me with respect to the period of Caravaggio's work which The Burial of St Lucy, pictured above, represents): there are lots of interesting things a person can talk about with respect to any work of art--possible motivations and influences on the painter, where the work falls in the more general drift of their art, the compositional and iconographical elements, choices of subject matter, etc etc. But ultimately, every analysis of a work has to come back to the central question "is this in the picture?"
You can do some speculative psychology on why Caravaggio was in Sicily for this painting in the first place, and that might be interesting, but it actually doesn't tell you a whole lot about the painting--maybe he's horrifically depressed at the time, and that's why the painting is as it is, but maybe he's not--you can construct multiple theories that are sufficient to get what you see, but you have no way of judging between them, because there's not really evidence to support those interpretations. And it's odd to discuss those aspects of the picture, when there are other, equally interesting topics to comment on (the use of space, the strong compositional linearity, the choices of colors), which you don't really have to speculate upon because they're in the picture.
Similarly, with a text, there lots of things you can do with it, depending on what it is you want to do, but any political theory worth it's salt will have enough in the text alone to keep you interested in it, without a need to go further afield. To be somewhat intentionally polemical on the issue, contextualism risks either reducing a text to it's immediate circumstances and consequently making it interesting only as a historical exercise, rather than a currently important political one; or else you're imposing an arbitrary set of concerns on the text.
Part of this seems to be an issue with political theory exceptionalism: I don't know that you'd look at an IR or American paper and decide that the theory or result being offered is wholly a matter of where it falls on a discourse on greater issues in the field (though this is obviously sometimes a concern--that's presumably why there are literature reviews). A reader should, presumably, be equally, or perhaps more, concerned with whether the theory, model, etc being offered makes internal logical sense, measures what it wants to measure, and whether the evidence being analyzed supports the conclusions being advanced.
Possibly more thoughts later. Possibly.
*this was labelled as a potentially Straussian move, but I do generally hold that, while what's in a text may not be the final and most developed set of thoughts a writer has on a topic, most people don't spend lots of time writing things they don't especially find interesting or true. What's in a text is there for a reason.
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