Significance
Political theory, as an approach to politics that embraces normative and philosophical analysis, can be seen as the longest and most clearly established tradition of political analysis. However, the status of political theory was seriously damaged in the twentieth century by the rise of positivism and its attack upon the very nor- mative concepts that had been its chief subject matter. Although the notion that political theory was abandoned in the 1950s and 1960s an exaggeration, the onset of the behavioural revolution' and the passion for things persuaded many political analysts to their backs upon the entire tradition of normative thought Since the 1960s, however, political theory has re-emerged with new vitality, and the previously sharp distinction between political science and political has faded. This occurred through the emergence of a new generation of political theorists, notably John Rawls (1971) and Robert Nozick (1974), but also through growing criticism of *behaviouralism and the re-emergence of ideological divisions, brought about, for instance, through anti-Vietnam war protest, the rise of feminism and the emergence of the *New Right and *New Left