Comparative politics and political theory

The past two generations of political scientists have witnessed the separation of factual institutional description from theoretical speculation, and then their reunion in a vigorous restatement of the discipline. In some sense this reunion represents no more than the restoration of theory to appropriate status in the ordering of political data. It also represents, however, the ultimate victory of the new political theory over arid abstraction on the one hand and trivial empiricism on the other.
Taken together, the essays in this volume reflect the thrust of the new political theory. They are organized to reveal the diffuseness of comparative and theoretical political study and to present the major dimensions of comparative politics: normative, conceptual, institutional, behavioral, and methodological. Underlying each contribution is the assump tion that, intrinsically, every theoretically relevant unit of political life is comparable, and every reliable agency of comparison in politics possesses theoretical significance. Included in the volume are the following essays: "The Myth of Equality and the Actualities of Power," by Richard McCleery