Abstract
Marx wrote about the poverty of philosophy in his time. I feel compelled to write about the poverty of political science in its empirical, behavioral style and to question the relevancy of the entire political and sociological research enterprise. Obviously, I can not attempt to do a full-scale criticism within the compass of an article, but set against the back-drop of six current volumes of political science research I can at least begin to hope for better things. As the French existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, we must try to speak as if no one has ever spoken before, yet never losing sight of the bearings which orient our thought and criticism. On the face of it, urban politics is a respectable enough venture in the new empirical political science. At least, the question-begging structural political science of past decades is overthrown under the all-seeing eye of empirical research. The study of power, since the Lynd's study of Middletown (with roots in Marx and Weber, not to mention Machiavelli), has been made realistic at least in the sense in which political institutional-
Published Version
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