Political Theory

Abstract

In recent decades political theory has been an area of undoubted strength in Australian political studies. Across fields such as deliberative democracy, republicanism, feminist theory, and environmental political theory, the Australian contribution to international debates has been considerable. Yet telling the story of the development of Australian political theory involves grappling with certain definitional challenges, which stem both from the nature of political theory as an intellectual endeavour as well as its ambiguous location within the academy. First, although the identity of political theory as a distinct academic sub-field is closely related to the development of political science it in fact draws on a range of intellectual disciplines including philosophy, history, sociology and law, and political theorists can be found in university departments in all of these disciplines. The second point concerns the political philosophy versus political science divide (with the corresponding division between ‘normative’ and ‘empirical’ theory) which has not been as sharply drawn in Australia as it has been, especially, in the United States, with its strong behaviouralist and positivist traditions. The dominance of a behaviouralist conception of political science — ‘the American Science of Politics’ in Bernard Crick’s phrase — gave rise to the oft-repeated story of the death of classical or normative political theory in the 1950s and 1960s, only to be revived by Rawls and Nozick in the early 1970s.KeywordsPolitical SciencePolitical TheoryAustralian StudyPolitical TheoriseDeliberative DemocracyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.