ABSTRACT
The first assault upon political theory, according to Dante Germino, came from within the "social sciences," beginning with Antoine Destutt de Tracy, followed by Auguste Comte, and culminating in the twentieth century in the work of Arnold Brecht and David Easton in the United States. Modem organizations, in collaboration with their intellectual analogue, modern social science, attempt to "dissect" political man, to co mpartmentalize him, in order to confer some semblance of management upon the parts of society; but this approach is only a symptom of rather than an antidote to the larger problem. The shift from "visual" to "abstract" politics meant that the "decline of the polis as the nuclear center of human existence had apparently deprived political thought of its basic unit of analysis, one that it was unable to replace." Perhaps the concern over the nature of theoretical inquiry as regards politics is in service of a lost cause, a dead issue.
