end in advanced industrial states (Bell 1960 ; Lipset 1960 ). The ‘‘end of ideol-
ogy’’ meant the collapse of radical, all-encompassing theories—represented
by Marxism, fascism, and Nazism—into the consensus of secular, liberal
democracy. It also meant the end of intense political struggles through the
turn to a problem oriented social science hewing close to facts on the ground.
Government grants supporting research into ‘‘developing nations’’ were be-
coming lucrative. The government could be trusted to make the needed value
judgments in applying this research, and the general populace could be
trusted to leave the micromanagement of problems to professionals. There
was little sense that the theory of developing nations was itself ideological.
A 1961 essay by Isaiah Berlin entitled ‘‘Does Political Theory Still Exist?’’
conveys the dominant mood of the day among theorists. The little word ‘‘still’’
tells it all. Berlin more or less ceded theWeld of facts and explanation to
scientists, while carving out a place for theory in the domain of belonging
and existential meaning. Political theory ‘‘diVers from political science... in
being concerned with somewhat diVerentWelds; namely with such questions as
what is speciWcally human and what is not, and why; whether speciWc categor-
ies, say those of purpose or of belonging to a group or of law, are indispensable
to... the source, scope and validity of certain human goals’’ (Berlin 1979 , 157 ).
Berlin soon regained his feet. And theorists as diverse as Sheldon Wolin,
Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin kept the tradition of theory alive during this
deadly period. Wolin’s book,Politics and Vision( 1960 ), indeed, enlivened a
whole generation of political theorists. But it took a series of new political
events to invigorate the debate between the scientiWc, value-neutral, profes-
sional aspirations of behavioralism and the value-laden, critical, and existen-
tially rooted practices of political theory. By the mid- 1960 s, growing outrage
about the Vietnam War, worries among college students about the draft, the
emergence of a civil rights movement, and an emerging feminism altered the
culture of the academy.
The end of ideology screeched to a halt. In the academy a series of studies
emerged to challenge the fact–value dichotomy, the diVerence between sci-
ence and ideology, the ‘‘elitist’’ conception of democracy extant models of
explanation, and the public roles of academics (Bachrach 1967 ; Connolly
1967 ; Kariel 1966 ; Kaufman 1968 ; McCoy and Playford 1967 ). A particularly
impressive challenge was posed by Charles Taylor. If others exposed how
‘‘biases’’ of the social scientist enter into concepts and assumptions, the
underlying question was: What do biases matter if test procedures are
sound and there is no value import of scientiWc study? In ‘‘Neutrality in
828 william e. connolly