The study of foreign governments during these decades continued largely along formalistic lines. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there was some real intellectual deterioration in this field of study. For historically, comparative government and political theory had been closely connected. The theme of the qualities and attributes of the various forms of polity was a central concern of political theory from the Greeks on through the nineteenth century. But in the early decades of the twentieth century the two fields separated, with political theory becoming an essentially historical subject matter, and comparative or foreign government becoming a formal and descriptive study of the great powers of western Europe."