Political theorists cannot reasonably maintain an institutional attachment to the discipline of political science and claim a place in the curriculum of the field while professing intellectual autonomy. Political theory is the progeny of American political science, as well as a subfield of the discipline, and it is important to dispel mythologies of political theory as a separate world-historical endeavor. Political theorists, like all social scientists, must realistically come to grips with their cognitive and practical relationship to their subject matter and resist the forms of dislocated rhetoric that sustain their often anomalous condition.
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White, Stephen K., and J. Donald Moon, eds. 2004. What is political theory?Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Wolin, Sheldon S.2000. Political theory: From vocation to invocation. In Vocations of political theory, ed. Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
