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IT IS PERHAPS A SIGN OF THE GREATER MATURITY OF THE discipline of political science today that the 'great debate' of the immediate postwar period on the essential nature of the subject has now died down. The vast quantities of ink that were spilled (and not a little blood) did not result in a victory for either of the two great camps - the traditonalists or the behaviourists - but in a recognition, however reluctant, that the subject of the study of politics was too great, and too complex, to be approached only from this angle or that, but required the application of many different methods, and of many different kinds of minds, if progress was to be made towards the better understanding of the ways in which man provided for his own overnance. However, if the students of political thought, of constitutions and institutions, now work alongside the practitioners of 'empirical', and indeed of quantititive, techniques for the study of politics, it is in large part due to the efforts of Carl Friedrich, who saw the need to maintain the intellectual unity of a subject which, since the time of Aristotle, had progressed, as indeed all subjects can only progress, by the continual interaction between those who contemplate its theoretical underpinnings and those who are knowledgeable about the data by which, in the end, the theories must be tested. The normative dimension of the study of man and his political activities, is an additional complication, but it does not absolve the theorist from the need to relate his theory to perceived reality, nor the empiricist from the necessity of placing his observations within a context which alone will give them significance.

THIS ARTICLE COMPRISES REMARKS MADE AT THE 1981 SPRING CONFERENCE OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL AREA POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION ON THE PRESENTATION TO THE AUTHOR OF THE ASSOCIATION'S ANNUAL PI SIGMA ALPHA AWARD. HE NOTES THE MANY DISTINGUISHED PUBLIC FIGURES WHO WERE/ARE POLITICAL SCIENTISTS AND WHO HAVE SERVED IN GOVERNMENT IN THE U.S. AND REAFFIRMS THE FUNDAMENTAL IMPORTANCE OF REASON AND FREEDOM.

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