Resurgence of political theory

Political theory was declared dead at the height of behaviouralism. Alfred Cobban (1953) called it moribund, David Easton spoke of its decline, and Peter Laslett announced in 1956 that "for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead", killed by logical positivism's verification principle, which reduced value statements to emotive noise.

The revival came from four directions:

• Normative reconstruction — Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) restored the grand tradition of reasoned argument about justice; Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) answered it.
• Conceptual analysis — Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty (1958) showed concepts themselves carry political stakes.
• Historical recovery — Skinner and the Cambridge School restored texts to their linguistic context.
• Identity-based critique — feminist (Okin, Pateman), communitarian (Sandel, Taylor, Walzer), multicultural (Kymlicka) and post-colonial (Parekh) theory.

The deeper cause was behaviouralism's own failure. Easton's post-behavioural revolution (1969) conceded that relevance and action must precede technique. A discipline that could describe voting patterns but say nothing about Vietnam or civil rights had proved value-neutrality to be a false economy.