David Easton’s 1953 complaint of political science’s ‘theoretical malnutrition and surfeit of facts’ has been echoed numerous times, recently for instance in the ‘Perestroika’ movement in American political science. Proposals for rectifying the theoretical deficit have been numerous, but one line of argument has come to predominate: the realist critique of political science’s positivism. This essay examines that critique and finds fault both with its characterization of positivism and its proposed remedy for the theoretical deficit. Its diagnosis and therapy are both philosophically inflated, with a dangerous promotion of a transcendental or speculative ontology and concomitant neglect of empirical constraints on theorizing. Yet with a restored but deeper emphasis on the empirical basis of theory, taking the question of the nature and causal mechanisms of ‘political culture’ as illustrative, and disregarding the inhibitions created by disciplinary boundaries, progress beyond theoretical malnutrition remains possible.
