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"Political theory is not a predictive science. It doesn't pretend to be a science at all. But that doesn't mean that it's not empirical, that it doesn't have something to tell us about the world as it is and is becoming. Some of us have been making the claim about the slow but steady collapse of the Republican Party and the conservative movement—which the Brookings Institution (the think-tank wing of mainstream political science) is now cottoning on to (see post below)—for some time. Not by running regressions, not by performing experiments, not by game theory, but simply by reading the theoretical canon of the right—listening to its inner music, attending to its thrumming bass—with an eye on the changing reports in the daily newspaper. I say this not to dis mainstream political science or empirical political science. Just the opposite: mine is a brief for a different kind of political theory from the one that the rest of the profession has made its peace with. Going back to grad school, my model of political theory has been neither ideal theory nor applied political theory nor the history of political thought but instead the kind of political theory that we see in everyone from Machiavelli and Marx to Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and the more legal/institutional wings of the Frankfurt School (Kirchheimer was one of my heroes in writing the second half of my first book). A theory that mixes canonical texts with literature, political history broadly defined—institutional, cultural, social, and economic—and daily journalism. The value of political theory is not that it provides normative standards to evaluate political facts. It's not that it introduces undergraduates or graduate students to a canon before they go off to learn about the real world. It's that it can shine a light on that world, enabling us to see—in classic texts—things that are present in the world but not always apparent."

--Corey Robin, on facebook