1 POLITICAL THEORY and POLITICAL PRACTICE Gordon Graham In 1962 Isaiah Berlin published an essay entitled 'Does Political Theory Still Exist?'. This appeared in the second volume of the series , Philosophy, Politics and Society and the question which forms its title was prompted in part by a remark in the introduction to the first volume in the same series that "for the time being political philosophy is dead". Berlin considers one version of this claim; that political theory might finally have given way to political science in something like the way astrology, say, came to be replaced by astronomy, Could empirical inquiry into the actual workings of politics render redundant the general interest in political ideas and conceptions that we find in a long list of thinkers from Plato to Mill? I am not here directly concerned with the issue of political theory versus political science, but with a closely related question: Is political theory normative? Since what Berlin has to say on the first issue throws some light on the second, we will have occasion to return to his essay. Berlin is clear as to why the future of political theory was at that time thought to be uncertain. The principal symptom which seems to support this belief is that no commanding work of political philosophy has appeared in the twentieth century. By a commanding work in the field of general ideas I mean at least one that has in a large area converted paradoxes into platitudes or vice versa. (The Proper Study of Mankind p.59) But, arguably, he wrote this too soon, because less than ten years later, in 1971, there appeared what in retrospect does seem to be the commanding work of this century -- John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Few books in any period, in fact, have dominated the political philosophy of their day quite so powerfully Rawls's Theory of Justice. Moreover, there is reason to think that the enthusiastic reception it met with is to be explained partly by the fact that it was perceived to be a work whose very existence refuted the doubts that Berlin addresses. A Theory of Justice seemed to overturn the contention that political philosophy was dead. We