ABSTRACT
The past few decades have been a renaissance for political philosophy: Rawls and Habermas, theories of multiculturalism, neo-republican thought and deliberative democratic theory. Every one of these strains reflects more than the ounce of optimism about human welfare, enlightenment, and freedom that is necessary to motivate political theory at its critical and constructive best. So it is not surprising that proud theorists reaffirm the orthodoxy that political theory sets the questions that political science investigates. The influence proceeds in one direction, on this view. True, theorists sometimes concede that their principles are constrained by common understanding of institutions and behavior, stability and efficiency. But that falls short of genuine reciprocity: political theorists’ avowed resource is not political science but history or metaphysics, moral psychology or the internal dynamics of philosophical argument.
