History Of Political Science Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The idea of politics as a subject of science is as old as Aristotle’s Politics, but, as British political theorist Bernard Crick stressed, political science, as a distinct academic discipline and branch of social science, originated as a uniquely American invention. Although there were, in many respects, functionally equivalent studies of politics in other countries, the history political science, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, was primarily a story of the “American science of politics.” Notwithstanding its universal scientific aspirations; its emigration and export to other countries, especially subsequent to World War II (1939–1945); and the waves of foreign influence that have at times significantly contributed to shaping the field, political science has borne a unique relationship to American political life and American democratic ideology. Although the history of the discipline could be written from many perspectives, an important dimension of that history is the democratic narrative. The field has always been committed to creating a truly scientific study of politics, but, despite changing images of science, there has been a consistent search for a discipline that would contribute to realizing and enhancing democratic values and institutions. In this respect, as well as with regard to matters of methodology, the genetic imprint of the American form has remained manifest in the extended speciation that now characterizes so many other countries within which the field has taken root and evolved.

It has often been suggested, however, that the simultaneous commitments to science and democracy have not always been in harmony. Although this tension has, in part, involved the problem of reconciling scientific and political criteria of judgment, it has also been the consequence of a longstanding assumption that only by remaining aloof from politics and establishing its claim to scientific objectivity could the discipline gain the cognitive authority to facilitate practical purchase. Consequently, it is not surprising that some have suggested that the discipline has, at times, become alienated from the realities of political life. However, self-consciousness about its relationship to politics has significantly informed political science’s successive crises of intellectual identity. Despite sometimes contradictory claims about the extent to which claims about politics and government produced by political science have influenced political ideas and behavior, the images produced by the discipline have, in various ways— such as through diverse levels of pedagogy and through their influence on a variety of media—been reflected in the practices of citizens and political actors.

There was, from the point of the formation of the U.S Republic, a theoretical paradox that has been a central axis in discussions of popular government. This paradox, which was bequeathed to the field of political science, emerged with respect to validating American democracy—and validating America as a democracy. While it was assumed that a republican or democratic regime was predicated on the existence of an intelligible and autonomous people, it was, at the same time, difficult, after the American Revolution (1776–1783), to identify any such entity. This search for a “people,” and for democracy, was, and has been, through the end of the twentieth century, confronted, and conducted, in two distinct ways. One approach is to argue that, despite great social diversity, there is an American people that has been the author and subject of democratic government. The other approach argues that the existence of such a national community is not necessary to achieve the ends of popular sovereignty. One persistent aspect of the democratic vision in the United States, represented in both of these approaches, is, however, its accomodational character. The tendency adapts the concept of democracy to changes in the perceived realities of American politics.

This paradox of democracy is first exemplified in The Federalist Papers, which were devoted to a defense of the proposed 1787 Constitution. While the authors maintained that the Constitution, manifesting the accrued wisdom of Western political thought regarding a science of politics, created a popular government that was republican, or representative, rather than purely democratic, they had difficulty clarifying and defending their continued allegiance to the basic idea of popular sovereignty. The concept of a people that had been at the core of revolutionary ideology, as well as essential to the arguments of certain Anti-Federalist criticisms of the new document, seemed to have an anomalous ring when juxtaposed to the images of American politics advanced by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. The Federalists and AntiFederalists shared the worry that there was not an identifiable American people, which transcended the smaller communities of the various states.

From one perspective, the genius of the authors of The Federalist Papers was to invent the very idea of a unified people that encompassed more local constituencies and that was to be represented in and by the new national government. To the extent, however, that the oft-mentioned “people” had a concrete meaning for Madison, as voiced in Federalist No. 10, it seemed, in the end, to refer either to the sum of self-interested individuals or to diverse and divisive factions that were characterized by their attachment to their own, rather than a public, good. In place of the traditional republican notion of an organic people, Madison conceived of a virtual people that would arise out of an institutional and social balance of conflicting interests. He argued that the disease of republican, and now American, government was factionalism but that it could transform its own cure through an intricate constitutional design combined with fortuitous demographic and geographical circumstances. Political discourse and commentary, however, kept alive the civic republican image of a people capable of, and the subject of, popular government, which lay beneath the surface of American diversity. The origins of political science were closely involved with vouchsafing that image.

The Science Of The Democratic State

During the nineteenth century, academic publicists produced their own version of the people, which was represented in the concept of the state. While today many tend to look back on this concept as an archaic formalistic and legalistic artifact, or as an intellectual reflection of American state-building, it was in fact the nucleus of a theory of American democracy. Apart from a reference to the American states, the word state had, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, little currency in the language of American politics.

The introduction of the concept of the state was largely through the work of the German émigré Francis Lieber, beginning about the time that his acquaintance, Alex de Tocqueville, visited America. Tocqueville had noted that the new world of American democracy demanded a “new science of politics,” and Lieber can reasonably be designated the founder of American political science. There was already a nascent program of civic education within the traditional American college and university curriculum; Lieber focused on expanding this field of study by integrating German philosophy and images of world history, particularly with his Manual of Political Ethics published in 1839. He applied that philosophy to the circumstances and traditions of the United States and to devising a solution to the perennial democratic paradox of a people ruling themselves and yet being ruled by a central government. His adaptation of the German philosophy of the state in his 1853 Civil Liberty and Self-Government paralleled the work of individuals such as the German theorist Johann K. Bluntschli, who wrote The Theory of the State, and, for nearly a century, it provided the intellectual, institutional, and professional foundation of academic political inquiry in the United States.

In 1857, Lieber was appointed the first professor of political science at Columbia College in New York. Second generation theorists perpetuated and refined his work, including Theodore Woolsey at Yale, Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, and, above all, John W. Burgess, who was Lieber’s successor at Columbia. Lieber, and the later American state theorists, who were educated abroad and imbibed the German paradigm of Staatswissenschaft, created the image of a democratic people as well as a history of democratic institutions that sprung from ancient Teutonic origins, passed through English government, and culminated in the American polity. Although Americans had at first been wary of the word democracy, it had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, been largely divested of its radical overtones and become a general term of approbation in the United States as well as in many places abroad.

Unlike some of his European counterparts and correspondents, such as Edouard Laboulaye in France, as well as the American historian George Bancroft, who all commented extensively on American political society and contributed significantly to the nineteenth-century democratic narrative, Lieber still feared “democratic absolutism” and, like Toqueville, majoritarian rule. He inveighed against ideas such as women’s suffrage and tended to eschew the word democracy in favor of phrases such as self-government and hamarchy, by which he basically meant representative institutions. His vision of the state, however, was essentially that of an associationally and institutionally diverse but organic people and its pedigree, which gave theoretical substance to the idea of democracy.

Although the “state talk” of nineteenth-century political inquiry, as well as that of public intellectuals such as Orestes Brownson and Elisha Mulford, paralleled the discourse of democracy in political life, it remained, like many later constructions of political science, far removed from the language of politics in the United States. The most essential feature of the concept of the state during this long and formative period in the evolution of American political science was that it did not refer either to forms of government or to the institutions of government, but rather to a primordial community whose voice expressed a will and interest represented by the agency of government but which preceded, in both time and authority, both the Constitution and the government.

This vision often reflected and abetted the conservative ideology of theorists such as Burgess, who wished to propagate and justify limited government as well as to curtail democratic populism while maintaining the ethic of popular sovereignty. It was also, in some ways, both inspired by, and functioned to legitimate, the cause of the Union before and after the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865). However, social scientists on the political left also embraced this vision, such as the economist Richard Ely, who perceived the state as authorizing government intervention in social life. The theory of the state provided a scientific identity for the discipline and sublimity for its subject matter, but, above all, it offered a distinct answer to the congenital paradox of American democratic theory. It was an answer that extended well into the Progressive Era after the turn of the century.

In Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (1891), Burgess validated this picture with a singular and ingenious account of American history. He argued that modern states, and particularly the United States, were prime examples of those founded on a national unity and that they represented a self-conscious democracy that was the apex of political history. Nations, as ethical and geographical units tended, at least in the West, to become states; that is, a people with a government—and the highest examples of the latter were those that had achieved the popular or democratic form.

The aim of Burgess’s interdisciplinary School of Political Science at Columbia (1880) was both to educate an American administrative and political elite and to influence government policy. The imprint of this curriculum is still evident in contemporary political science programs, and Columbia produced the first professional journal of political science, The Political Science Quarterly (1886), which was devoted to the assumption that the “domain of political science” was the study of the state and that among the social sciences concerned with this subject, political science occupied the dominant position. Similar institutional developments took place under Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University, which published Studies in History and Political Science and was the site of the first professional political science association. In Europe, institutions such as École Libre des Sciences Politiques in France and the London School of Economics in Britain were established. By this point, political scientists were still not always clearly distinguished from historians and economists, but the theory of the state primarily bound them together.

The third generation of political scientists, which included Bernard Moses at the University of California at Berkeley, Woodrow Wilson at Johns Hopkins and Princeton University, and W. W. Willoughby at Johns Hopkins did much to institutionalize the field of political science in American universities during the last years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. By the last decade of the 1800s, however, a significant theoretical transformation began to take place. Theorists such as Wilson (The State, 1889), continued in many ways to affirm some aspects of the traditional theory of the state, but they also began to blur the line between state and government. The problem, in a country of great and increasing complexity and multiplicity, was to specify the locus of the invisible community that putatively constituted the American people, and, eventually, no one did more than Willoughby (An Examination of the Nature of the State, 1896) to empty the word state of its original theoretical meaning and transform it into an analytical or juristic category and synonym for government. This, however, precipitated a crisis in democratic theory.

Although it is often assumed that there was a fundamental break between the state theory of the nineteenth century and the conceptions of both political inquiry and politics embraced by early twentieth-century political scientists, the continuities in many respects exceeded the innovations. One might very well ask how the largely conservative academic culture that dominated nineteenth-century universities, such as Columbia, produced the progressive reform-minded scholars, such as the historian and political scientist Charles Beard and, particularly, Charles Merriam, who might well be considered the father of twentieth-century political science and who contributed so significantly to transforming the discipline. In addition to retaining commitments to the idea of scientific inquiry and its application to practical ends, one thread of continuity was a persistent belief in, and dedication to, the national state as encompassing both government and community. During the early part of the twentieth century, Progressive politics and political and social thought continued to be predicated on the belief, such as in the case of the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (1909), that there was an incipient national political community or, like Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life (1910), that such a community could be created and mobilized, and in whose name government could legitimately and authoritatively act. It was, however, from both traditional state theory and the Progressive vision that a new account of democratic government in America emerged. The decline of the state as a theory of democracy paralleled the beginning and evolution of the theory of democratic pluralism and the account of science and forms of research that the latter entailed.

During the last years of the nineteenth century, professional social science associations began to break away from the umbrella of the American Social Science Association (ASSA) and to affiliate more directly with academic institutions, under the assumption that this would provide scientific authenticity and authority. The American Political Science Association (APSA), under the leadership of individuals such as Willoughby and its first president Frank Goodnow was formed in 1903, when it broke from the American Historical Association, and the American Political Science Review (APSR) began publication in 1906. The practical concerns of the previous generation were perpetuated in the creation of this organization, but it represented an emerging progressive ideology and a commitment to endowing the discipline with greater scientific authority. This was achieved by embracing what were viewed as the methods of modern empirical science. For individuals such as Wilson and Goodnow, who were dedicated to more efficient and effective government, these goals were still ultimately practical. There was, however, something of a theoretical hiatus regarding democracy and the nature of politics as the original concept of the state continued to wane, and, at the same time, departments of political science and government continued to emerge at major university systems such as California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford.

Pluralism And The Liberal Science Of Politics

The demise of the theory of the state was in part a reaction— in the context of World War I (1914–1918)—to its German origins, but it was also a consequence of the dimming Progressive hope to awaken or create a democratic public that could rise up and take power back from corrupt politicians and a capitalistic economic hegemony. Social scientists, in the wake of immigration and growing cultural and class differences, became overwhelmed with evidence of social and economic diversity and contentiousness. There was an increased sense that there was no homogeneous American public, but rather only complex congeries of interests and groups. In 1907, Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart noted that even though the idea of the state as the basis of a theory of popular sovereignty seemed to still hold sway, it really did not fit the present circumstances of American politics. Although he expressed faith that America was a democracy, he could no longer account for it theoretically.

To provide such an account was thus the task of pluralist theory as it evolved during the first third of the twentieth century. Individuals such as Lawrence Lowell (Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1913), and, later, Walter Lippmann (The Phantom Public, 1925) questioned the existence of an actual public or even the reality of a public opinion that commentators such as James Bryce (The American Commonwealth, 1890) had emphasized as constituting the heart of democratic society in America.

Despite the publication of William James’s Pluralistic Universe in 1904, the term pluralism had not entered the discourse of American political science in any substantial manner by the early twentieth century. Although Arthur Bentley’s pointed critique of the concept of the state and his analysis of interest groups as the essence of politics, in his 1908 Process of Government, would become a central reference for later pluralist theory, it had very little immediate impact, and Bentley never employed the term pluralism. It was during Harold Laski’s brief sojourn in the United States after World War I that the term was introduced as part of his attack on the idea of state sovereignty and centralized authority, and his propagation of the notion that the state was merely one association among many in society. Laski’s principal concern, as in the case of Tocqueville, was his own country, but he, as well as other English theorists such as Ernest Barker and A. D. Lindsay, helped instigate a debate about pluralism that focused on whether political reality consisted of anything more than an endless process of group interaction, with the government functioning as an arbiter, and whether this could add up, empirically and theoretically, to democracy. It was difficult, however, for American political scientists to give up the idea that the state was nothing more than government and that government was not the agent of a general popular will.

Charles Merriam embraced certain democratic values associated with cultural diversity and political pluralism, but he was equally impressed with the divisiveness inherent in such difference and with the antidemocratic sentiments and practices of certain groups. He retained the assumption that democracy ultimately required unity, even if, in his view and that of his student Harold Lasswell, it was necessary to introduce it from the top down through social control, civic education, and even the judicious use of propaganda. They transferred their hopes for a democratic society to the actions of governmental elites informed by social scientific knowledge, but no articulate image of American democracy and the American political system appeared, for example, in Merriam’s principal work of this period, particularly New Aspects of Politics in 1925, even though he sponsored much of the research and modes of inquiry that seemed appropriate for a changing image of politics.

The strongest riposte to the normative theory of pluralism associated with Laski and other writers of the period, as well as to empirical political scientists and sociologists whose work increasingly lent support to the notion that politics was irreducibly pluralistic, was the work of William Yandell Elliott in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (1928). He spoke for many of his generation when he argued that to give up the concept of the state as an organic public was, in effect, to give up democracy as well as the autonomy of political theory and political science. Elliott did not reject the reality of pluralism, but he believed that it tended to undermine the communal basis of democracy. He argued that in an age dominated by empiricism and pragmatism, as well as by the threat of fascism and communism, it was still possible to perceive and believe in what he called a co-organic community in American political life, which was the basis of constitutional government. It was difficult, even for someone such as John Dewey (The Public and its Problems, 1927)—who along with Laski, Elliott perceived as a purveyor of relativism and its destructive implications for democracy—to sever the idea of popular government from the existence of a national community that transcended the complexity of modern “great society.”

By the end of the 1920s, however, the concept of pluralism had become Americanized and formed the basis of an empirical account of American politics and a normative image of democratic practice. This closely connected to work by G. E. G. Catlin, a transplanted British scholar who championed both pluralism and the work of Merriam, in The Science and Method of Politics (1927). For the first time since Madison, a description of social diversity and conflict and of group pressures on government was transformed into a theory of popular government that would provide much of the content of a new and widely embraced image of democratic identity.

The group theory of political reality subsequently became deeply entrenched in political science as it evolved into an argument about how the process of interest group politics constituted a form of democratic interaction and representation. This had been implied by the early research of individuals such as Pendelton Herring (Group Representation Before Congress, 1927), but, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, a number of individuals such as Peter Odegard (The American Public Mind, 1930) and John Dickinson (“Democratic Realities and Democratic Dogma,” APSR, 1930) elaborated a pluralist theory of democracy containing all the essential theoretical elements that were rearticulated and reconstructed a generation later in the work of individuals such as David Truman and Robert Dahl.

At the core of this theory was the claim that all societies consisted of groups seeking their own self-interests and that this, at any stage of social evolution, required mechanisms for compromise and adjustment. In the context of modern society, such adjustments were achieved through the medium of government, which functioned as an umpire acting in response to the needs of the situation and with respect to matters of intervention and control. It was through participation in groups that individuals realized their goals and achieved identity, and it was through groups gaining access to influence, more than through formal institutions, that democratic representation was most essentially effected. Stability in society was achieved through a balance of conflicting social pressures constrained by appropriate enabling institutions and a basic consensus on the rules of the game. Majoritarian democracy was viewed as a myth that belied the fact that majorities were little more than aggregations of individual preference that were democratic only in the sense that they had the capacity to effect a circulation of elites through elections.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, political science continued to be institutionalized and expanded as a part of higher education in the United States, and during this period, membership in the APSA tripled. The work of Merriam and Lass well at the University of Chicago represented the most important developments in the field, but early forms of political science were emerging in England, France, and Germany. During the latter part of the 1930s, there was little in the way of a further explicit statement or elaboration of pluralist theory, but it became, in both politics and the academy, the basis of an account of the United States as a democratic society, and it was advanced as distinguishing the American polity from the growing number of totalitarian regimes, which seemed to be characterized by excessive unity. The name for this new democratic identity was liberalism, and the manner in which pluralism was transfigured as liberalism is a crucial chapter in the story of the evolution of democratic theory in American political science.

Although common in Europe, the term liberalism had seldom been systematically invoked in either U.S. politics or political science before the 1930s. Politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt began to court this label for a variety of policy initiatives, and everyone eventually adopted this synonym for democracy. A variety of individuals, including Herbert Hoover, claimed to be the “true” liberal, but Roosevelt won the title, and his opponents eventually accepted the name he had originally pejoratively bestowed upon them— conservatives. The term liberalism gravitated into the language of political science, often via those such as Dewey who were sympathetic to the New Deal, but eventually political theorists such as George Sabine in his paradigmatic A History of Political Theory (1937) emptied the concept of its concrete political meaning and began writing the history of Western political thought and institutions as a story of the progress of liberalism. This story found full expression in American society despite the temporary aberrations of totalitarianism. Although there continued to be a certain correspondence between the academic and lay visions of liberalism, two quite distinct traditions of discourse began to evolve as liberalism, in the language of political science, was reified, provided with a philosophy and history, and reimposed as a description of American politics.

To the extent that liberalism had a definite conceptual meaning in the literature of political science and political theory, other than a name for American government and society, it tended to be pluralism and attending values such as individualism, social freedom and difference, bargaining, and compromise. Philosophers such as T.V. Smith (The Promise of America, 1936) took the position that what characterized democracy was less any absolute doctrine and regime than a commitment to toleration and the propagation of diversity within a procedural framework for settling conflicts. By the early 1940s, the basic elements of this vision were extracted from the research of mainstream political science, systematized by individuals such as Pendleton Herring, and presented as the Politics of Democracy (1940). Herring saw his task as taking all that was often considered bad about politics—from pressure groups to bosses and soft money—and demonstrating that they were all, if understood scientifically, part of a democratic process. One reason for the rearticulating of pluralism qua liberalism was to provide a response and counterideal to the doctrines of totalitarianism. For Lass well, political science continued to be part of what he titled in a 1942 essay “The Developing Science of Democracy.”

The Behavioral Era And The Reconstitution Of Science And Democracy

Even as the discipline of political science was expanding in the United States after World War II, it was proliferating abroad. In 1949, the International Political Science Association formed in Paris, which brought together national associations from numerous countries in Europe and elsewhere. The emerging national forms of the discipline were in many respects increasingly responsive to and reflective of the social and cultural milieu in which they were situated, even though the American commitment to empirical and quantitative studies was widely accepted and promulgated along with more traditional historical and institutional forms of research. In the United States, David Easton’s The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (1953) set the agenda for the next decade by defining political science as the study of the “authoritative allocation of values” and making the case for moving beyond mere factual research and historical and traditional institutional forms by advancing empirical theory and adopting the methods of natural science. The behavioral “revolution,” for which Easton was often the principal spokesperson, transformed the practice of political science and increased the substantive and methodological contributions on a variety of subjects, including survey research and voting behavior. It was, however, less a revolution in many respects than a recommitment to the visions of both the scientific study of politics and liberal democracy that had informed the discipline for nearly a half century; it was also, in part, a response to the first significant challenge to those visions.

By the 1950s, the academic image of liberalism had become increasingly dominant as such individuals as Daniel Boorstin (The Genius of American Politics, 1953) and Louis Hartz (The Liberal Tradition in America, 1955) set out to demonstrate that although there might not be an American public, there was a historically rooted liberal value consensus and tradition that gave credence to the concept of e pluribus unum. This notion of a liberal consensus that transcended and reconciled group differences became an essential element of the revived group theory of politics. The continuing attempt to give meaning to the idea of liberalism, and to equate liberalism with democracy, was, however, catalyzed and galvanized by a persistent but often still somewhat submerged attack on liberalism. This began to influence what had been, since the 1920s, a thoroughly American political science. By the 1950s, liberalism became a highly contested concept in American politics because of both doubts about interventionist government and events such as the McCarthy hearings. For quite different reasons, it was also losing its positive valence in academic discourse as a critique of liberal democracy and political science began to infiltrate the discipline and form a counterpoint to the postwar behavioral movement in political science, and its rededication to a scientific study of politics based on emulating what was assumed to be the methods of natural science.

This critique, largely conceived and mounted by émigré scholars, was gaining a place in the literature of political theory, and it was manifest in journals such as the Review of Politics, with its theological antiliberal perspective, as well as in the perspective of University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins and those involved in the Committee on Social Thought at the institution, who set themselves directly against the traditional Chicago image of social science. A new mode of political theory emerged that eventually led a number of scholars to choose between political science and political theory. The confrontation between this critique and the reconstituted pluralist account of liberal democracy in politica science comprised the dialectic of democracy in the postwar generation. At this point, what separated mainstream political scientists from political theorists was less a commitment to science opposed to a commitment to normative theory than two quite different ethical positions revolving around the issue of democracy.

The predominantly German scholars who emigrated to the United States beginning in the 1930s were in many respects a philosophically and ideologically diverse group that included Hans Morgenthau (Scientific Man and Power Politics, 1946), Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1951) Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History 1953), Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958), and members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school such as Herbert Marcuse,Theodor Adorno, Otto Kirchheimer, and Max Horkheimer. They shared a suspicion of liberalism, which they believed was philosophically flawed as a political theory and an inherently pathological political form that represented political institutions. These institutions historically were the threshold of totalitarianism, as in the case of Weimar Germany. This form of antimodernism, rooted in the politics and intellectual context of early twentieth-century Germany and in various transcendental philosophies and socialist thought, was a strange and difficult body of ideas for Americans to absorb. These theorists, who rejected scientism and were wedded to images of the decline of Western civilization, represented a profound challenge to a conception of democracy based on commitments to empiricism, relativism, liberalism, and historical progress. These commitments had characterized American political science for half a century. By the end of the 1950s, the work of these foreign scholars largely began to define the subfield of political theory, which heretofore was an integral dimension of mainstream American political science and the principal vehicle of its vision of democracy. This challenge, coupled with the continuing concern about presenting a coherent image of democracy as a counterpoint to totalitarianism, prompted the postwar reconstitution of group theory and the pluralist account of democracy.

David Truman’s The Governmental Process (1951) and Earl Latham’s The Group Basis of Politics (1952) revived the relevance of Arthur Bentley’s work, and Robert Dahl’s Preface to Democratic Theory (1955) established the genre of empirical democratic theory, which was devoted to vouchsafing the image of pluralist democracy. The latter work was in one respect less a “preface” than an “epilogue” and codification of ideas that, during the 1930s, had become an essential part of the identity of political science. Dahl returned to Laski’s and Barker’s term polyarchy as a synonym for a form of democracy that Dahl contrasted both with majoritarian, or populist, types and with what he claimed was Madison’s excessive emphasis on constitutional checks and balances at the expense of adequate attention to the informal and social dimensions of group interaction where, in effect, minorities ruled. In Who Governs (1961), Dahl explicitly embraced the term pluralism, and his theory of pluralist democracy was offered in part as a counter to the claims about elitism and the structure of community power advanced by individuals such as C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956) and various sociologists such as Floyd Hunter. Yet it was also an attempt to systematize and accentuate an image of Western liberal democracy during the cold war that supported the faith of those who opposed the political ideas and institutions of the East. Dahl, like those after him such as Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (The Civic Culture, 1963), argued that study should begin by examining the character of those countries known to be democracies and by extracting an empirical basis for a normative theory that, Dahl claimed, was most fully represented in the “American hybrid.” A wide range of political theorists in the 1960s, however, perpetuated the critique of liberalism and pluralism. The “end of ideology,” that had been proclaimed by sociologists such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset as the future of the dominance of pluralist liberal democracy, failed to materialize. While the debate precipitated between political theory and behavioral political science during the 1960s is often represented as a conflict between “scientific” and “traditional” theory, the underlying issue was the nature of democracy. The émigré-inspired critique was at this point joined by theorists such as Sheldon Wolin (Politics and Vision, 1960) as well as by the persistent progressive statist countertradition that had remained alongside pluralist theory in political science. This was now represented in a new form by individuals such as E. E. Schattschneider (The Semisovereign People: A Realist View of Democracy in America, 1960). Schattschneider argued that interest group politics had an upper-class bias as well as a corrosive effect on party democracy. Grant McConnell (Private Power and American Democracy, 1966) and Theodore Lowi (The End of Liberalism, 1969) mounted sustained attacks on what they claimed were the democratic and institutional pathologies of the theory and practice of interest-group liberalism. Despite their similarities, the critiques of behavioralism and liberalism that were inspired by the émigré theorists and those that were rooted in the American tradition were sometimes uneasy allies, such as in the Straussian-inspired Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1961).Yet, a growing intellectual split between political theory and mainstream political science characterized the 1960s and evolved through the 1980s.

From Postbehavioralism To The Twenty-First Century

Although Dahl had proclaimed in 1961 that it was possible to write the essay “An Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest” with respect to the behavioral movement, both the commitment to pure science and the pluralist theory of democracy continued to be the target of widespread criticism from political theorists and a number of more mainstream political scientists. This dissatisfaction sprang, in part, from what seemed to many to be political science’s lack of relevance for, and attention to, political events such as the Vietnam War, the crisis of American cities and problems of civil rights, and cold war politics. The Caucus for a New Political Science challenged the authority of the APSA, and in 1969 Wolin pitted the “vocation of political theory” against what he claimed was the apolitical “methodism” of behavioral political science.

At the same time, APSA president-elect Easton repudiated the tenets of much of what had represented the behavioral movement when he announced a “new revolution in political science.” This was to be a post behavioral revolution, which would recognize the deficiencies of the pluralist theory of democracy and embrace a new “credo of relevance,” giving precedence to research on pressing contemporary political issues rather than to the immediate advancement of scientific theories and methods.

By the early 1970s, concerns about practical issues led the mainstream discipline to seek an identity for the postbehavioral era with a return to what Lass well had championed as policy science. A more ecumenical spirit was apparent as the debate about behavioralism wound down and the issue of maintaining professional inclusiveness became more prominent. Although the controversy about behavioralism had created an intellectual breach between mainstream political science and the subfield of political theory, it also had the effect of relocating, or dislocating, the discussion of American political identity and democratic theory. While political science continued, in various ways and degrees, to validate the traditional liberal vision, it tended to concede to political theory the role of normative theorizing after the 1970s.The conversation about democracy and liberalism increasingly became the property of the interdisciplinary and relatively autonomous enterprise of political theory. It subsequently absorbed into an eclectic conversation, determined more by reigning academic philosophical authorities than by any direct relevance to the particularities of American politics. Debates about liberalism became a large part of the focus of political theory, while political science as a whole and political theory as a subfield became increasingly pluralized.

By the mid-1980s, it was increasingly difficult to speak in general of political science as a discipline and of the history of the field as a whole. Although the debate about behavioralism had fractured the field, it had also constituted the terms of a common conversation that in some respects defined the discipline. The need to recognize the growing distinctions among national practices of political science accentuated the centrifugal forces of specialization, increased concerns about social and gender diversity within the profession, and other internal tendencies toward pluralization in the field. In 1982, the IPSA Study Group on the Comparative Sociology of Political Science was formed, and in 1986 the International Committee for the Study of the Development of Political Science supplemented it. These two groups merged in 1988, forming the IPSA Research Committee for the Study of Political Science as Discipline, which was formally recognized as an IPSA Research Committee 33 (RC 33) in 1989. Since its formal establishment, RC 33 has been active in all of the IPSA congresses, and it has also undertaken a number of intercongress workshops, conferences, research projects, and publications devoted to the study of the history and character of political science in various countries and to features common to the field as a whole. The research sponsored by this endeavor clarifies that political science is no longer simply the American science of politics.

The beginning of the 1990s was a watershed for political science. The public policy orientation inspired by the events of the 1960s had begun to fade, and many believed that the growing popularity of what Anthony Downs had referred to with the title of his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), and what came to be referred to as rational choice analysis, promised a new methodological basis for disciplinary identity as well as a reconstruction of democratic theory. This trend, however, was paralleled and challenged by those who had begun to advocate new directions in institutional and historical research, such as Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpo in Bringing the State Back In (1985). There were calls for more diverse approaches to the study of politics as the enthusiasm for rational choice declined, illustrated with Kristen Monroe’s compliations in The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Assessment of the Theory of Rational Choice (1991). The collapse of communism and the bipolar world of the cold war also heightened the sense of plurality as the basic condition of politics and political science, and it catalyzed a renewed concern with the theory of democracy as a variety of national communities sought to define and redefine themselves as democratic societies. In this context, pluralism emerged once again as a dominant theme. Not only had politics become internationally more diverse, but concerns about multiculturalism and philosophies such as postmodernism accentuated the value and reality of diversity.

After its intellectual estrangement from mainstream political science, a unifying and driving force in the increasingly dispersed conversation of political theory continued to be a critique of the liberal and pluralist visions of democracy and an attempt to resurrect some version of participatory democracy. By the early 1990s, however, there was a subtle, but in some ways quite fundamental, shift in perspective. Although the idea that democracy must be rooted in unity was still evident in the work of individuals such as Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000), who stressed the importance of “social capital” and a communal basis of democracy, the concept of pluralism once again appeared in the discourse of political theory as the centerpiece of the democratic imagination. The concept was seldom that of the interest-group liberalism of the 1950s, but theorists such as Dahl and Charles Lindblom maintained their faith in social diversity as the ultimate value of democracy. Both Rawls (Political Liberalism,1993) and Jürgen Habermas (Facts and Norms, 1992) manifested an increased acceptance of the social realities of liberal democracy, and the many and various versions of deliberative and radical democracy embraced the ethic of pluralism.

The new pluralism, like the emergence of the old pluralism, seems in large measure to be a response to the realities of the sociology of contemporary society. Dahl took it as a virtue that in a polyarchial society one might say that no one governs or that minorities govern, but the problem always was that if this is the case, then it also means that democracy, as the mediation of public decisions through the general citizenry, is difficult to identify. Plurality, one might argue, is surely a necessary condition of any realistic concept of democracy, but it may not be a sufficient condition. In the last analysis, the philosophical reconciliation of pluralism with democracy has been no easier than it was at the time of Madison.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was difficult to discern any clear basis of unity in the discipline, despite a persistent faith that there is an overall identity attaching to the field. This is illustrated by editors Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Ingram, in Political Science:The State of the Discipline (2002), and by the end of the first decade, it was still not easy to specify what trends may be most significant. The subfield of political theory continues to be quite intellectually disjoined from the mainstream discipline, and a subfield such as international relations often seems to embrace a relatively independent agenda.

In the United States, concerns about methodological diversity and practical relevance surfaced once again in what came to be known as the perestroika debate, but the issues often appeared more professional than intellectual and political. The discipline’s origins were closely tied to a definite practical mission of political reform and political education, and the relationship between political science and politics remains unresolved. In addition to noting the continuing tendencies toward specialization within and among subfields, as editors Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann put forth in the 1996 A New Handbook of Political Science, it is necessary to recognize that in taking account of the history and current practices of the field, the story of political science, despite some continuing intimations to the contrary, is no longer simply the story of the American science of politics.

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