Theory and the Study of Politics

Abstract

In the omnibus philosophy of an earlier day the pursuit of knowledge was the pursuit of science. Political science became a specialized discipline only very recently, and while it gained by its specialization it also suffered because of it. One of the nice tasks of modern political science is how to avoid the effects of descriptive detail as a substitute for theory and once again relate political phenomena to broader patterns of human activity, without losing the advantages, particularly in research, of the specialized knowledge and lore so laboriously acquired.