The Revival of Political Theory

Abstract

WXC TITH APPALLING SWIFTNESS, the judgment that political theory is on the verge of extinction has spread through the political science profession. Heading the professional mourners is Alfred Cobban, who has done as much as anyone to establish the allegation that political theory is in lamentable decline as a virtually unchallenged cliche. Cobban's essay of almost a decade agol obviously captured the mood of a sizeable body of political scientists, some of whom have actually resorted to funereal metaphors to describe the present condition of political theory.2 I propose to argue that this thesis is seriously in error and that its continued acceptance only obscures the fact that an extensive and significant effort is being made at the present time to restore political theory as a tradition of inquiry. My contention is that what Cobban has described as a decline in political theory is actually a crisis in positivist political science. He has chronicled the inevitable demise of political theory within the positivist universe of discourse, where the fact-value dichotomy reigns as dogma. The Cobban position fails to recognize that political theory is an experiential science of right order in human society and that theory can never be redeemed or intellectually legitimized by indulgence in subjective value speculation. Only by virtue of the recovery of a sound ontology and an adequate epistemology will political theory be able to flourish as it once did; this will require an abandonment of the physicalist interpretation of experience that has for decades been dominant in political science. Such a major philosophical reconstruction is now under way in our