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1 Politics and Vision W I L L I A M E . C O N N O L LY
Political Theory and the Political To study political theory in 1960 was to participate in an enterprise widely thought to be moribund. The air was thick with funeral orations. Because a new science of politics was on the verge of consolidation, political theory in the “normative” or “traditional” sense had become unnecessary. The old theory was speculative and impressionistic, while the new science would be rigorous and testable; the old mixed the descriptive and the normative, while the new would separate them rigorously; the old was too historical in focus, while the new science of lawful regularities tied to predictable events would be drawn from observable evidence in the present. Some interesting questions in the venerable texts might be convertible into testable hypotheses, but in the main and for the most part political theory was in the way and on the way out. Sure, the shape of the future science was still marked by uncertainty. Several “models” competed for hegemony. There was public choice theory, decision-making theory, systems theory, power theory, communications theory, structural-functionalism, and so on. But, as David Easton put it in a formulation marked by his typical politeness, these perspectives were united in their opposition to traditional theory and bound together by precepts conveyed best by the word behavioralism: The behavioral approach testifies to the coming of age of theory in the social sciences as a whole, wedded, however, to a commitment to the assumptions and methods of empirical science. Unlike the great traditional theories of past political thought, new theory tends to be analytic, not substantive, explanatory rather than ethical, more general and less particular. That portion of political research which shares those commitments to both the new theory and the technical means of analysis and verification thereby links political science to broader behavioral tendencies in the social sciences; hence, its description as political behavior.1
The title of a 1961 essay by Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” well conveys the sense of beleaguerment felt by many theorists. Berlin conceded much as he carved out a space for theory, for he did not
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