Decline of political theory. (2018, 2023, 10 Marks)
The decline of political theory names the claim, made between the early 1950s and the early 1960s, that systematic normative reflection on politics had lost its purpose, its method and its audience. It was voiced by a new political science after the world wars moved the discipline’s centre from Europe to the United States. The obituaries were written by practitioners themselves, so the claim deserves a hearing before it is qualified.
Why the ground shifted
- Speculation over problems: theorists glossed the canon and political history while depression, war and decolonisation went unanswered.
- Lagging method: sociology and psychology had adopted survey and statistical tools; political science still leaned on philosophy, history and law.
- Failure abroad: the legal-institutional model could not explain parties, armies and patronage in the new states of Asia and Africa.
- The behavioural answer: David Easton sought a value-free pure science of politics, marginalising normative theory.
The obituaries
- Alfred Cobban, “The Decline of Political Theory” (Political Science Quarterly, 1953): theory, once addressed to rulers, had become an academic exercise for other academics; bureaucracy in liberal states and the vanguard party’s oligarchy in communist ones left it no practical role.
- Peter Laslett (1956): for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead. Logical positivism had reduced value statements to preferences, leaving philosophers unsure what political philosophy could claim to know.
- Robert A. Dahl (World Politics, 1958): in the English-speaking world, where so many problems seemed solved, political theory was dead.
Easton’s four causes
Easton, in The Political System (1953), blamed the traditionalists:
| Cause | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Historicism | George H. Sabine and William A. Dunning made theory a history of ideas, living parasitically on century-old thought |
| Moral relativism | Treating values as mere preference left no ground for building new value theory |
| Confusion of science and theory | Method was prized over purpose |
| Hyperfactualism | Theoretical malnutrition and a surfeit of facts |
Behind these sat the end-of-ideology thesis of Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset (both 1960): if the great battles were settled — Lipset, in Political Man, called Western democracy the good society itself in operation — only technical questions remained. Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” (1989) revived the premise — yet settled values are a political claim, not a finding.
Was the decline real?
Partly. In 1950s Anglo-American journals normative argument was scarce, and theory was taught as a canon rather than practised.
But the subject never stopped. Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History, 1953), Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958), Sheldon S. Wolin (Politics and Vision, 1960) and the Frankfurt School all wrote through the supposed death. Dante Germino‘s Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory (1967) read the same years as a quiet renaissance, carried by Arendt and Strauss along with Michael Oakeshott, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Eric Voegelin. Isaiah Berlin‘s “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” (1962) supplied the logical rebuttal: so long as people disagree about ends and values collide, no empirical technique can replace theory.
Easton’s own “The New Revolution in Political Science” (1969) launched post-behaviouralism, and theory widened through feminism, post-colonialism and post-modernism.
India offers a counter-case: the Constituent Assembly Debates (1946–49) were a sustained public exercise in normative theory — on minority rights, property and B. R. Ambedkar’s warning that political democracy cannot last without social democracy. Yet Bhikhu Parekh‘s “The Poverty of Indian Political Theory” (1992) found a later drought, as empirical studies crowded out normative work.
Conclusion
The decline was real but local: a crisis of one genre, Anglo-American academic political philosophy under positivist pressure, mistaken for the death of the subject. John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971) ended the debate. The “Perestroika” revolt of 2000 against method-driven political science shows the underlying danger — method outrunning purpose — recurs; empirical research stays sound only with a normative anchor.