In this text the author proposes a reappraisal of Political Theory, based on the statement of its "death" and, at the same time, of its reassessment from the mid-1970s on. The author's proposal consists in to establish a distinction between first- and second-order theorizations, that is, between the reflections on political life's generals conditions and the study of those reflections. Next, author shows how the factors that dismissed normative theorization in other decades - particularly Behaviouralistic Political Science - have declined, and, at the same time, new questions concerning political life (in the United States: Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, Feminist Movement) have brought to daylight the discipline of Political Theory. The author finishes the text remembering the importance of the close work between "empirical" political scientists and "normative" political theorists, as being concerned to two closely related aspects of the same phenomenon - as scientists and as citizens.
Political Theory; Political Science; Behaviouralism; values