A fundamental premise for the development of a vigorous political theory is the possibility of providing a reflexive intelligibility for its own development and, for these purposes, relating its intrinsec explanations to the external history of its successes and failures. The goal of the present work is to carry out a tentative inventory of the development, problems and challenges of political theory in recent decades, in an attempt to analyze this development as part of a wider intellectual history. Thus, we must return to the 1960s, when the perception of a decline in theoretical reflection emerged; from this moment on, a surprising "resurgence" of political theory seems to have come about. The present text suggests that there has been a reconstruction of political theory over the last few decades involving a fundamental reconfiguration of its premisses. One of the central elements of this reconfiguration has been the progressive separation of philosophical and historical aspects of theoretical construction represented within this reconstruction by two of the theoretical currents that emerged in the 1970s: normative political theory and the history of political thought. This narrative, then, proposes the reconstruction of a particular point of view and emphasizes particular aspects of the theoretical elaboration that has unfolded over the last few decades, relegating the analyses of certain authors and formulations that although substantively important cannot be taken into consideration here.
Political Theory; Political Science; History of Political Thought; Normative Theory