This article seeks to readdress the defining of political theory not by encapsulating its rightful place in a single definition, but rather by distinguishing between ‘the political’ and ‘the social’. By using the public realm as a vehicle, this article highlights inconsistencies between the ‘political public realm’ and the ‘social public realm’ that help to demonstrate the differing themes between political and social theory. An Arendtian approach to the resulting plurality of perspectives and the space ‘in-between’ them is used to formulate an overall position on the state of the discipline of political theory as a whole.
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