chapter 45
...................................................................................................................................................THEN AND NOW:
PARTICIPANT-
OBSERVATION IN
POLITICAL THEORY
...................................................................................................................................................william e. connolly
Political theory was widely held to be a moribund enterprise when I began
graduate school at the University of Michigan in the 1960 s. Empiricists were
pushing a new science of politics, designed to replace the options of ‘‘consti-
tutional interpretation,’’ ‘‘impressionistic theory,’’ and ‘‘traditionalism.’’ They
disagreed, of course, on which model would succeed, with public choice theory,
systems theory, power theory, communications theory, structural functional-
ism, decision-making theory, and, most encompassing of all, ‘‘behavioralism’’
constituting the leading alternatives. What these schemas had in common was
the promise,Wrst, to oVer rigorous explanations with predictive power, second,
to anchor these explanations in observable facts in order to resolve diVerences
between contending explanations, and, third, to avoid metaphysical specula-
tion and the murky, ‘‘subjective’’ domain of ‘‘value judgments.’’
Associated with this spirituality was a wider claim, advanced vigorously by
Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, that ideology hadWnally come to an