Kaufman 2006. Dividing the Domain of Political Science

Northeastern Political Science Association

Dividing the Domain of Political Science: On the Fetishism of SubfieldsAuthor(s): Timothy V. Kaufman-OsbornSource: Polity, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 41-71Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877090 .

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Polity * Volume 38, Number 1 * January 2006

( 2006 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/06 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

Dividing the Domain of Political Science: On the Fetishism of Subfields*

Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn Whitman College

American students of political science have repeatedly bemoaned its failure to achieve the status of a coherent intellectual discipline. This essay suggests that claims regarding the disarray of political science are, at the very least, exaggerated. For several key purposes, the profession ascribes near totemic status to four specific subfields: political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. While one might argue that these categories are innocuous administrative conveniences, that claim would be mistaken. Subfields are vehicles of power insofar as they participate in the allocation of rewards within the discipline, and, more fundamentally, insofar as they participate in structuring our understanding of the nature of politics itself Inquiry into the emergence and consolidation of political science's basic subfields, however has been almost entirely ignored in accounts of the discipline and its history This essay aims to remedy that gap in our understanding. Polity (2006) 38, 41-71. doi: 10. 1057/palgrave.polity.2300035

Keywords American political science; discipline; subfields; behavioralism

Timothy Kaufman-Osborn is the Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership at Whitman College. He is the author, most recently, of From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State (2002). He served two terms as president of the Western Political Science Association, and is currently the president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington. He can be reached by e-mail at: [email protected].

"Go to, let us centrifugate!" Anonymous graduate student at The John Hopkins University in 1882.1

*For helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay, I wish to thank Paul Apostolidis, Michael Brintnall, and Dvora Yanow

1. Quoted in John Higham, "The Matrix of Specialization," in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 7.



42 SUBFIELDS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

The Unruly Science of Rule

On reviewing the history of American political science, one might well conclude that the only concern that has truly unified this enterprise over the course of its first century is the question of whether political science is or is not a discipline.2 While the occasional Panglossian tale has been told about the discipline's steady march toward the status of a genuine science,3 far more common are the laments regarding the inability of

political scientists to agree on the nature of their distinctive object of inquiry; the methods appropriate to study of that object, however defined; the

appropriate epistemic organization of a field devoted to its study; the curriculum that will best introduce students to this field; etc. Chronic anxiety about political science's title to disciplinary integrity resonates in the claims of those who fret openly about its status, and, arguably, much the same is true of those who protest, perhaps a bit too vigorously, that this warrant is secure.4

In 1913, speaking on behalf of the Committee on Instruction in Government, organized by the fledgling American Political Science Association, Charles Haines worried: "With the exception of a tendency toward uniformity in the courses announced by a few colleges and the larger universities there is a marked lack of agreement as to the meaning of the term political science. .. .A more definite agreement as to what constitutes political science, and a more aggressive insistence on the necessity of distinguishing these courses from other groups, seems to be the first requirement to secure the recognition of political science as

2. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman make much the same point in the preface to their edited volume titled Discipline and History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993): "(T)he identity of the discipline has been and continues to be constituted not by agreements over fundamental principles, but by long-standing debates over the meaning of politics, the methods of science, the theories of behavioralism or the state, and the responsibilities of public professionals and civic educators. Political science is, as it were, the history of its debates, and the state of the discipline at any one time is the state of its debates, in light of their history" (v).

3. For an example of such a Panglossian tale, see the introduction to A New Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Kingemann (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996). For a

helpful review of what they call "Whiggish" and "skeptical" narratives of the history of political science, see John Dryzek and Stephen Leonard, "History and Discipline in Political Science," American Political Science Review 82 (December 1988): 1245-60.

4. For an example of the latter, see the report issued by the Committee on Standards of Instruction of the American Political Science Association under the title "Political Science as a Discipline'" American Political Science Review 56 (June 1962): "Political science is a basic discipline in the social sciences.

Although it must necessarily maintain close scholarly association with the disciplines of history, economics, sociology, anthropology geography, and social psychology, political science cannot be considered a part of any of these social sciences. Political science has its own area of human experience to analyze, its own body of descriptive and factual data to gather, its own conceptual schemes to formulate and test for truth" (417).



Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn 43

worthy of a place in the colleges as a distinct department.'5 Some sixty years later,

suggesting that Haines's plea had fallen on deaf ears, in the preface to their eight volume Handbook of Political Science, Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby conceded that "early in his [sic] career, the fledgling political scientist learns that his discipline is ill-defined, amorphous, and heterogeneous."6 Still more recently, deploying the metaphor of "solitary diners in a second-rate residential hotel;' Gabriel Almond contended that "in some sense the various schools and sects of political science now sit at separate tables, each with its own conception of

political science, but each protecting some secret island of vulnerability."' Two

years later, in 1990, Almond acknowledged that the discipline does indeed

display some measure of unity, but only insofar as the various departments bearing its name comprise a "loose aggregation of special interests, held together by shared avarice in maintaining or increasing the departmental share of resources: tenure-track billets, salary increases, reductions in teaching loads, liberal leave policies, and the like.'8

This impression of disciplinary disarray, if not outright incoherence, is

amplified by a cursory examination of a recent edition of the American Political Science Association Directory of Members.9 That directory identifies its members

through reference to eight "general" fields (American Government, Comparative Politics, International Politics, Methods, Political Philosophy and Theory, Public

Administration, Public Law and Courts, and Public Policy), and then furnishes an additional 92 "special" fields for those who find the basic eight too Procrustean.

Designating "methods" as one general field among several, this categorization scheme effectively concedes the absence of a single dominant mode of inquiry

5. Charles Haines, "Report on Instruction in Political Science in Colleges and Universities: Portion of Preliminary Report of Committee of American Political Science Association on Instruction in Government ' Proceedings of the American Political Science Association 10 (1913): 255-56.

6. Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, Vol. I (Reading, MA:

Addison-Wesley, 1975), v. 7. Gabriel Almond, "Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science;' PS: Political Science and

Politics 21 (Fall 1988): 828. 8. Gabriel Almond, "The Nature of Contemporary Political Science: A Roundtable Discussion:' PS:

Political Science and Politics 23 (March 1990): 35. For a comparable lament, see John Wahlke, "Liberal

Learning and the Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession:' PS: Political Science & Politics 24

(March 1991): "While no longer rent by such bitter disputes, political science still lacks consensus on basic epistemological assumptions. It lacks agreement on the basic questions it should address, on the basic concepts that should guide and organize research, and on what methods of analysis to apply and when. The resulting lack of a body of empirical theory, the paucity of general introductory courses, the

heterogeneity of such courses as do exist, the diverse character of higher-level courses and the loose

programmatic structure tying them together constitute formidable problems, which must be addressed when considering the political science curriculum" (51). For a study indicating that departments have

apparently paid little or no heed to this exhortation, see John Ishiyama, "Examining the Impact of the Wahlke Report: Surveying the Structure of the Political Science Curricula at Liberal Arts and Science

Colleges and Universities in the Midwest,' PS: Political Science & Politics 38 (January 2005): 71-74.

9. Directory of Members, 1997-99 (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1997).




within the discipline, only to betray additional confusion by identifying "comparative politics:' which would appear to be one such method, as yet another

general field of inquiry Turning to the officially sanctioned "special" fields, one finds categories ranging from specific countries (e.g., Canada, Japan, Spain); to

geographical regions (e.g., Scandanavia, Southeast Asia, and perhaps tongue in cheek, the Balkans); to entire continents (e.g., Africa); to specific institutions (e.g., presidency legislative studies); to identity-based groupings (e.g., lesbian and gay politics, Latino politics, Native American politics); to policy domains (e.g., energy policy education policy regulatory policy); to canonical traditions (e.g., political thought: history, which is distinguished from normative as well as positive political theory); to political practices (e.g., electoral systems, political development); to

expressly interdisciplinary areas (e.g., political psychology religion and politics, literature and politics); and, finally, to idiosyncratic areas whose exact status within the discipline is unclear except perhaps to their adherents (e.g., evaluation

research, life sciences, and politics). When this hodge-podge is considered in

conjunction with the ferment recently provoked by the loosely organized movement dubbed "Perestroika" and, more specifically its challenge to the internal governance structure of the organization that works so assiduously to sustain our belief that we do indeed belong together, it is no surprise that so many recent assessments of

political science conclude on a sour note: "There is:' wrote William Crotty in 1991,

"a mood of disenchantment. The unity cohesiveness, and commonalities of the field seem to be in eclipse; perhaps they have already been abandoned.'

In this essay, I do not intend to argue on behalf of a more unified discipline or, for that matter, a more fragmented one. Instead, I am interested in what I take to be a puzzle, one which suggests that lamentations regarding the wholesale

disarray of political science are, at the very least, exaggerated. For several key purposes, creating order out of the discipline's apparent chaos, the profession ascribes near totemic status to four privileged subfields: political theory,

10. William Crotty, "Introduction: Setting the Stage" in Political Science: Looking to the Future, Vol. I, ed. William Crotty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 3. A few students of the discipline have suggested that the proliferation of subfields is not a sign of a discipline in disarray but of its status as an innovative hybrid. See, for example, Mattei Dogan, "Political Science and the Other Social Sciences" in New Handbook: "The process of specialization has generated an increasing fragmentation in subfields, which are not 'amorphous' but rather well-organized and creative. The 'heterogeneity' has been greatly nourished by exchanges with neighboring disciplines through the building of bridges between specialized fields of the various social sciences. This process of cross-fertilization is achieved by hybridization" (97). For another argument to the effect that the multiplication of subfields is to be celebrated rather than bemoaned, see J. Donald Moon, "Pluralism and Progress in the Study of Politics" in Political Science: Looking to the Future. There, although acknowledging that there are "genuine costs associated with fragmentation," Moon argues that the conflict spawned by the various contending approaches to the study of politics has produced "a luxuriant growth of different fields, approaches, concerns, methodologies, and forms of political commitment" Moon concludes by arguing that the

quest to achieve anything akin to a Kuhnian "normal science" of politics is "chimerical" (45-46).




American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. Although other manifestations can be cited, these four subfields are most consequentially employed, first, to divide our intellectual productions, as evidenced by their deployment to categorize all scholarship reviewed in the American Political Science Association's recently created Perspectives on Politics; and, second, to organize doctoral programs in political science as well as undergraduate major programs. While one might be inclined to argue that these categories are mere administrative conveniences, which, as such, are innocuous in their import, that claim would be mistaken. In certain crucial ways, these four subfields have now become at least partly constitutive of the discipline and so of the identities of its members. The work they do is apparent, for example, in our professional self- identifications and so in our relations to one another; in the allocation of positions within departments; in turf wars over teaching areas; in the structuring of curricula and examinations at the undergraduate and graduate levels; in the categories to which job advertisements are most often assigned in the APSA personnel newsletter;" in market-driven pressures on graduate students to produce dissertations that can be located in terms of these subfields; in the standards against which colleagues are measured for purposes of contract renewal, tenure, and promotion; and, I would argue, in our very conception of the enterprise of politics as well as the discipline's role in articulating and often

confirming historically specific constellations of political order. Subfields, in short, are vehicles of power; and, for that reason alone, one might expect that they would secure considerable attention from a discipline that prides itself on its special expertise in studying power's dynamics. Yet, although we have many histories of the discipline,12 inquiry into the emergence and consolidation of political science's four basic subfields has been nominal at best.

As a first step toward remedying this gap in our understanding of political science and its history, in this essay I offer a genealogical inquiry into its current epistemic organization and, more particularly, of the four-subfield model. This

inquiry is conducted in the skeptical spirit suggested by Wendy Brown who, in the context of a study into the history of women's studies programs, wrote: "Certainly, when peered at closely, the definitions of all disciplines wobble, their identities mutate, their rules and regulations appear contingent and contestable. Most disciplines, founded through necessary exclusions and illusions about the

11. The categories currently employed by the APSA in posting positions include the four basic subfields, but also the following: Administration; Methodology; Public Administration; Public Law; Public Policy; Non-Academic and Other.

12. See, for example, Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1967); David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and Raymond Seidelman (with Edward Harpham), Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884-1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).




stability and boundedness of their objects, have reached crises in their attempts to secure their boundaries, define an exclusive terrain of inquiry, and fix their

object of study. And in most cases, the desire to persist over time has resulted in a certain conservatism, or its close cousin, methodism."'13

To demonstrate one form such conservatism has assumed in political science, in the next section, I substantiate my claim about the hegemony of the four- subfield model in doctoral programs in political science as well as undergraduate major programs, especially at liberal arts colleges. In the following section, in order to show that this model is not in fact coeval with the history of political science in the United States, as many assume, I explain how the university model of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century displaced the classical curriculum within which the study of politics, absent subfields, once found its

home; and in the next two sections I indicate the fluid and inconstant character of the borders erected during the first half of the twentieth century in order to

partition the new discipline into different domains of inquiry. In section that

follows, by tracking the various ways scholarship has been organized in the pages of the American Political Science Review since its inception, I show that the four- subfield model did not clearly emerge until after World War II and was not consolidated until the early 1970s; and then I offer an explanation for this consolidation through reference to the thwarting of the behavioral revolution's effort to transform the discipline of political science into a methodologically unified enterprise, although that rebuff, I argue, must itself be understood in relation to the exhaustion of political energies that coincided roughly with the end of the war in Vietnam. The net result, I suggest in my conclusion, is a sort of unreflective compromise that tolerates the haphazard multiplication and formalization of new areas of political inquiry in response to changing configurations of power within the discipline, while at the same time reinforcing the cardinal subfields for which we cannot provide a coherent rationale but which we also apparently cannot do without. The upshot is an American political science absent much in the way of genuine politics; and that, arguably is just what we might anticipate in a nation where interest groups proliferate with abandon while the structural imperatives of the late liberal state prove more or less impervious to significant transformation.

The Four-Subfield Model Within the Curriculum of Political Science

Within the apparent disjointedness of political science as a discipline there resides an oasis, a place seemingly untouched by the agitation that marks the

13. Wendy Brown, "The Impossibility of Women's Studies:' Differences 9 (Fall 1997): 85.




larger field. That place is found in our disciplinary curricula, and, more

particularly, in the fields employed to structure doctoral programs in political science as well as the major programs of this nation's undergraduate colleges. In 2003, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea published a study of political science graduate programs at 57 institutions.14 This sample included 43% of the doctoral programs identified in the 1998-2000 APSA Graduate Program and Faculty Guide, which in turn accounted for 61 percent of the U.S. graduate student population in political science. Among other findings, Schwartz-Shea determined that the four-subfield model predominates in these programs. Looking at "major fields:' defined as areas in which students may write dissertations, she found that 96.5 percent of the 57 institutions offer fields in American politics and international relations; 95.0

percent in comparative politics; and 79.0 percent in political theory. While other fields are occasionally offered, their numbers pale in comparison to the principal four. For example, only 44.9 percent of the 57 offer a field in methodology; 31.6

percent in public policy; 21 percent in public law; 17.5 percent in public administration; 16.0 percent in formal theory; and 10.5 percent in political economy.15 The ascendancy of these four central subfields is perhaps still more

striking since 30 percent of the programs reviewed by Schwartz-Shea require no core course aimed at introducing graduate students to the discipline, including seven of the ten top-ranked programs.16 On this basis, she concludes, "a

significant proportion of the most highly ranked programs has given up on the notion of a substantive core that should be transmitted to all doctoral students, regardless of field,17 whereas relatively few, it would appear, have given up on the

14. Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, "Is This the Curriculum We Want? Doctoral Requirements and Offerings in Method and Methodology," PS: Politics & Political Science 36 (July 2003): 379-86. For a more detailed account of her findings, see Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, "Curricular Visions: Doctoral Programs, Requirements, Offerings, and the Meanings of 'Political Science"' at http://www.poli-sci.utah.edu/ SchwartzShea%20Curricular%20Visions.htm (last visited on April 19, 2005).

15. It is worth noting that, in recent years, a small number of graduate programs, including those at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, have begun to experiment with new ways of structuring the political science curriculum. On this point, see "Report from the Task Force on Graduate Education"

(Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 2004): "A few departments have recently begun to restructure their program to feature the study of various sorts of substantive political problems, such as the design and operation of institutions and issues of conflict and violence, rather than traditional subfields such as comparative politics, American politics, and international relations" (5). The report is available at: http://209.235.207.197/imgtest/graduateeducation.pdf (last visited on April 21, 2005). For more specific information on the experiment now underway at Yale, see http://www.yale.edu/ polisci/initiative.html (last visited on April 21, 2005).

16. Of the 57 institutions investigated by Schwartz-Shea, 33% require one or two courses of all

graduate students, and 37% require three or more. The rankings employed by Schwartz-Shea come from three sources: US News and World Report, the National Research Council, and Michael Ballard and Neil Mitchell, "The Good, the Better, and the Best in Political Science:' PS: Political Science & Politics 31

(December 1998): 826-28. 17. Schwartz-Shea, "Is This the Curriculum We Want?,' 381-82.




notion that the discipline should require the vast majority of Ph.D. candidates to identify themselves in terms of the four-subfield model.

Turning to political science major programs at undergraduate liberal arts

colleges, the hegemony of the four-subfield model is still more pronounced. In order to determine the typical requirements of such programs, I employed the 2003 version of US. News & World Report's ranking of liberal arts colleges to

generate a sample of fifty institutions.18 Virtually without exception, all of the

political science departments at these top-ranked institutions take the four basic subfields as their central organizing principle, and then erect their major requirements on the basis of those subfields.

To cite just a few representative examples, Colby College requires its students to take a total of ten courses in political science, including Introduction to American Government and Politics, Introduction to International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Introduction to Political Theory, as well as at least one

upper-level seminar. Almost identically, Kenyon requires its majors, again in

addition to at least one upper-level seminar, to complete ten courses in political science, at least one of which must be in each of these four standard subfields. Mount Holyoke, in addition to requiring three unspecified upper-level courses, requires at least one course in each of these same four subfields. Bowdoin

requires each political science major to complete an area of concentration, involving at least four courses, in one of these same subfields and to complete at least one course in each of the remaining three. Skidmore, besides requiring an

introductory course in U.S. Government, another in World Politics, and six credits of upper-level course work, also requires at least one additional course in each of the four standard subfields.

Among these fifty colleges, variations on this basic structure are few and far

between, and, where they do appear, they are modest at best. For example, at

Haverford, Oberlin, and Pomona, each of which uses the same four subfields to structure the major program, students are required to take courses in at least three of the four. At Carleton, in addition to introductory courses in each of the four standard subfields, majors are required to take a course titled Methods of Political Research (although methodology is not listed as a separate subfield). Bryn Mawr and Williams both employ the conventional four subfields to structure their major programs, but permit students to develop an alternative area of

concentration, should they so desire. At Amherst, a fifth subfield, law and public policy, is added to the standard four, and courses are recommended but not

required in any. In sum, the variations that do appear in the political science

major programs at these fifty institutions involve not their basic organizational

18. See http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/ranklibartcobrief.php (last visited on April 19, 2005).




structure, but, rather, the number of courses that must be taken in each subfield, the specific number of subfields that must be completed, the presence or absence of an introductory course that precedes the required courses in the various subfields, and, very occasionally, the opportunity for students to substitute a subfield of their own design for one of the elementary four.19

In light of this evidence, it seems remarkable that the 1991 report of the APSAs Task Force on the Political Science Major, "Liberal Leaning and the Political Science Major," concluded, as it did, that "undergraduate political science

programs today collectively present a picture of disparate and unstructured

practices,1 and that the "plasticity of definitions of 'subfields. ..over time and

among departments, has been extraordinary."20 This conclusion would surely come as news to the vast majority of this nation's political science under-

graduates, as the following thought experiment suggests: Imagine asking several tenured faculty members of several political science departments at several large research-oriented universities to draw a map, so to speak, of the discipline's overall intellectual structure. My guess, which is perhaps overly generous, is that each map would prove to be an internally complex construction; that many would differ from one another in significant ways; and that these differences would be indicative of disagreements about the boundaries, however ill-defined, circumscribing the discipline as a whole, the identity of its major provinces, and the sublocalities within each province as well as the precise location of the borders demarcating each from the others. Now, imagine putting the same

question to several undergraduate political science majors at several liberal arts colleges in the United States (and possibly to an equal number of Ph.D. candidates at research-oriented universities as well). It is my guess that few would find this an unduly perplexing task; that the map drawn by any one would not differ dramatically from that drawn by students at different institutions; and that each would most likely consist of something akin to a four-cell structure, with

19. Of the fifty institutions whose programs I examined, only three depart in any significant way from the basic model exemplified by the others. Whitman College is perhaps the most anarchic in the sense that its Department of Politics does not make reference to or employ any subfields in the organization of its major program, opting instead to permit each student to develop his or her own course of study in consultation with a departmental advisor. Bates College requires each declared political science major to complete either a self-designed area of concentration or one of the department's approved concentrations (which, at the time of this writing, include the following: U.S. National Institutions; U.S. Political Processes; Legal Studies; Cultural Politics; Postcolonial Politics; Economic Aspects of Politics; International Studies; History of Western Political Thought; Women and Politics; and Politics of

Development and Transformation). Finally, Sarah Lawrence College is truly the maverick of the group insofar as it has no major programs in any discipline. Instead, each student works with an academic advisor in order to design an individual program of study, although students may choose to concentrate in any one of 35 fields, one of which is political science (although it is not itself partitioned in accordance with the standard subfields).

20. Wahlke, "Liberal Learning:' 50.




each cell tidily demarcated from the others. If this hypothesis is plausible, then

perhaps there is something to be said for an inquiry into this formulaic structure, especially in light of the unsettled disciplinary context within which it is situated. When did these subfields first emerge within the discipline, how were they consolidated, why do they persist today, and what effects do they generate in terms of our conceptualization of politics, our professional identities, and, finally, the discipline's status within the larger political order of which it is a part?

The Classical Curriculum and Its Decomposition

The discipline of political science at its inception was not divided into any subfields, let alone those with which we are now familiar.21 Prior to the last third of the nineteenth century, most American higher education took place in small

colleges, of which there were more than two hundred by 1860.22 More often than

not, these institutions were founded by clerics seeking to advance a particular body of sectarian doctrine. In addition to training young men (for the most part) for participation in public life, whether as minister, public servant, or citizen, the transmission of knowledge within such institutions aimed at improving its

recipients not so much by expanding their grasp of value-neutral facts, but by instilling Christian and/or republican civic virtue as well as the wisdom necessary to its exercise.

By and large, America's colleges during this period offered a fairly standard course of instruction, conventionally known as the "classical" curriculum.23 The

typical character of that curriculum, whose theo-philosophical underpinnings were best elucidated in John Newman's The Idea of a University (1852),24 is well-

21. For the results of my earlier inquiries into the history and structure of political science major programs in the United States, see "Re-Thinking the Political Science Major at Liberal Arts Colleges:' PS: Political Science and Politics 23 (March 1990): 56-61, as well as "From the Science to the Art of Politics," PS: Political Science and Politics 24 (June 1991): 204-05.

22. For accounts of the liberal arts colleges of the nineteenth century, as well as the emergence of universities and, more specifically, graduate programs in political science, beginning in the 1870s, see Robert Adcock, "The Emergence of Political Science as a Discipline: History and the Study of Politics in

America, 1875-1910:' History of Political Thought 24 (Autumn 2003): 481-508; Anna Hadow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1900 (New York: D. Appleton-Century 1939); Ricci, Tragedy of Political Science, 29-56; Dorothy Ross, "The Development of the Social Sciences" in Discipline and History 81-104; Somit and Tanenhaus, Development of American Political Science, 11-41; Laurence

Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); and

Dwight Waldo, "Political Science: Tradition, Discipline, Profession, Science, Enterprise" in Handbook of Political Science, 18-41.

23. For the best known and most vigorous defense of the classical curriculum, see "The Yale Report of 1828" in American Higher Education: A Documentary History Vol. I, ed. Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961): 275-91.

24. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University ed. Frank Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).




indicated by the following diagram, reproduced from the 1882-83 catalogue of one of the 50 liberal arts colleges included in the sample discussed in the

previous section:

Fall term

Virgil Xenophon Geometry

Livy Trigonometry Physiology

Rhetoric Mechanics

Chemistry

Psychology Quintillian Greek Testament

Whitman College Classical course

Winter term Freshman year Cicero Herodotus

Geometry

Sophomore year Thucydides Analytical Geometry Zoology

Junior year Greek Drama

Optics Chemistry

Senior year Ethics Constitution of the U.S. Didactics

Spring term

English Literature Homer

Algebra

Horace Calculus

Botany

Tacitus

Astronomy Geology

Political Economy Evidences of religion Orations

Although this strictly prescribed curriculum was weighted toward the study of Greek and Roman classics, as well as mathematics and the various natural sciences that were rapidly disaggregating themselves from what was once "natural philosophy," it also held a place for the study of politics, specifically, in the form of courses on the U.S. Constitution and Political Economy However, these courses were not taught in academic departments, of which there were

none; nor, obviously, were they the offerings of an autonomous social scientific

discipline. That said, these courses did constitute an essential component of the classical course, taught, as they were, during the culminating senior year and in

conjunction with two other cardinal areas of inquiry: Ethics and Evidences of

Religion. Explaining the place of political inquiry in the final year of instruction at such liberal arts colleges, David Ricci writes: "It was not unusual for the senior course to include logic, rhetoric, philosophy, natural law, the law of nations,




politics, and political economy Accordingly, the typical college president would

enjoy an imposing academic title, such as 'Professor of Moral and Mental

Philosophy, Political Economy, and Polite Literature, and would be responsible for teaching subjects ranging from constitutional law to evidences of Christianity He was, in fact, a personification of the classical notion that some sort of a roof must be provided for the Temple of Science, that an overarching synthesis of wisdom must combine various realms of learning-the Temple's columns-into a comprehensive point of view"'25

The decomposition of the classical curriculum is inseparable from the

emergence of a new institutional form, the modern university (which must itself be understood in relation to larger structural developments within the liberal state and capitalist economy during the late nineteenth century). With displacement of the idea of knowledge ultimately grounded in the architectonic structure furnished by Christian faith, there gradually appeared in its stead our more familiar understanding of knowledge as something to be accumulated by experts and conveyed by professionals whose authority stems from their mastery of a specialized discipline. Although not quite as neatly as my account suggests, this development was in large measure a function, first, of the lateral proliferation of new courses on topics once covered, more or less well, within the more comprehensive offerings of the classical curriculum (e.g., the

emergence of courses on politics and economics out of the category of political economy); and, second, of the vertical introduction of newly constituted research-oriented graduate programs patterned, for the most part, after the German programs to which so many Americans flocked following the end of the Civil War.

As students, beginning at Harvard in 1869, were gradually released from the uniform requirements of the classical course via adoption of elective systems,26 something akin to contemporary academic departments were invented, more or less haphazardly, but especially in the 1890s, in order to provide some measure of organizational structure to this less tidy curriculum. "In the social sciences as in other subjects,' writes Edward Shils, "the development of academic departments transformed heterogeneous and somewhat inchoate bodies of intellectual activities and beliefs into disciplines"27 (although, as Somit and Tanenhaus point out, the boundaries dividing these departments from one another would remain

25. Ricci, Tragedy of Political Science, 58. 26. See Ricci, Tragedy of Political Science, 41: "The switch to elective courses received an imprimatur

of respectability in 1869, when President Eliot announced his intention to remake Harvard's curriculum

according to the new principle. . .Eliot attacked the classical notion that a student's mind can be trained

only by proper exposure to the right subjects. To the contrary, he argued, a student can acquire mental

competence by strict attention to any important and challenging field of study" 27. Edward Shils, "The Order of Learning in the United States: The Ascendancy of the University" in

Organization of Knowledge, 38-39.




"relatively unhardened"28 for at least another generation). Thus did an administrative solution to an organizational problem help to constitute

disciplines that in time came to imagine themselves as progenitors of the

departments bearing their names. The nation's first graduate program in political science was created under the

leadership of John W Burgess at Columbia University in 1880 (although Francis Lieber had been appointed the nation's first professor of history and political science, also at Columbia, in 1857). The stated purpose of the School of Political Science was "to give a complete general view of all the subjects both of internal and external public polity, from the three-fold standpoint of History, Law and Philosophy."29 Its inaugural curriculum, as the following diagram indicates, "was less a distinct discipline than a holding company for a variety of endeavors that were in various ways related, but no longer easily resided in other

disciplines":30

Columbia University Course of study in the School of Political Science, 1880-8731

First year

First term

Physical and Political Geography Ethnology General Political and Constitutional History of Europe Political and Constitutional History of England to 1688 Political Economy: History of Politico-Economic Institutions

Philosophy: History of Political Theories from Plato to Hegel Bibliography of the Political Sciences

Second term Political and Constitutional History of the United States

28. Somit and Tanenhaus, Development of American Political Science, 50 nl: "Strictly speaking, it is inaccurate to say that these were 'departments' of political science as we know them today. During most of the formative era, as we have seen, doctoral training in political science was not clearly differentiated, even at Hopkins and Columbia, from training in history, economics, and sociology" For more on the

emergence of departments in response to growing administrative dilemmas, see Veysey Emergence of the American University, 320-24.

29. See Hadow, Political Science in American Colleges, 180. 30. John Gunnell, "Political Theory: The Evolution of a Subfield" in Political Science: The State of the

Discipline, ed. Ada Finifter (Washington, D.C.: The American Political Science Association, 1983), 6. Gunnell's claim here concerns the early discipline of political science as a whole, although it applies equally well to Columbia's graduate program.

31. A History of the Faculty of Political Science, ed. R. Gordon Hoxie, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 305-06.




Political and Constitutional History of England since 1688 Political Economy: Taxation and Finance

Philosophy: History of Political Theories from Plato to Hegel Bibliography of the Political Sciences

Second year First term

History of Roman Law, to the present day Comparative Constitutional Law of the Principal European States and of the

United States Statistical Science, Methods and Results

Second term

Comparative Jurisprudence of the Principal European Systems of Civil Law

Comparative Constitutional Law of the Several Commonwealths of the American Union

Statistical Science, Methods and Results

Third year First term

History of Diplomacy Private International Law

Comparative Administrative Law of the Principal States of Europe and of the United States

Social Sciences: Communistic and Socialistic Theories

Second term Public International Law Private International Law

Comparative Administrative Law of the Several Commonwealths of the American Union

Social Sciences: Communistic and Socialistic Theories

Note that this curriculum included courses in history, economics, ethnology, and geography, which might be taken as evidence of an interdisciplinary orientation, but cannot in fact be read in those terms since the social sciences were not yet unambiguously differentiated from one another. Also, note that this curriculum was organized not in terms of subfields, but, rather, as was its classical

counterpart, in terms of a chronological sequencing, albeit absent the architectonic structure that drew the classical curriculum to its theo-philosophical apex in the senior year. In thematic terms, Burgess explained, the Columbia




curriculum was ordered around the concept of the state, beginning at the

undergraduate level with the "the origin and development of the State through its several phases of political organization down to the modern constitutional form:' followed by graduate study of "the existing actual and legal relations of the State," and concluding in an effort "through comprehensive comparison to generalize the ultimate principles of our political philosophy, aiming thus to escape the

dangers of a barren empiricism on the one side, and of a baseless speculation on the other."32 Additionally, note that no method of inquiry clearly predominated, although historical and comparative forms of analysis, focusing for the most part on the United States and England, and consisting chiefly of descriptive and formal institutional inquiries, were most commonly employed. Finally, indicating persistence of the European view that several forms of knowledge are crucial to the enterprise of statecraft, note that each term of the first year of instruction included a bibliographical course on what to us cannot help but sound quaint, or perhaps even dissonant: the "political sciences." In any event, a comparison of Columbia's initial graduate program in political science with Whitman's classical curriculum clearly anticipates the accelerating irrelevance of the liberal arts

college in determining the shape of higher education in the United States. What it does not so clearly anticipate is a discipline that derives its organizational structure or its intellectual rationale from the existence of certain clearly demarcated and privileged subfields (which is not to deny, obviously, that courses in several traditions of inquiry, e.g., political theory, that would eventually be

incorporated within the four canonical subfields were taught as part of this

curriculum).

Securing the Discipline's External Borders

In this section, for the most part, I am interested in consolidation of the

discipline of political science following creation of Columbia's inaugural program; and in the section that follows I am chiefly interested in early efforts to partition that discipline once its external borders had been secured. As already noted, the conceptual linchpin of academic inquiry into politics during the late nineteenth century was the state, understood as the locus of sovereign power within a given political order, and, as an expression of that state's will, the law.33 This focus was reflected in popular textbooks, including Politics:

32. John Burgess, "The Study of the Political Sciences in Columbia College," International Review 12

(1882): 348. 33. On this point, see James Farr, "From Modern Republic to Administrative State: American Political

Science in the Nineteenth Century" in Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the Development of Political Science, ed. D. Easton, J. Gunnell and M. Stein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995): 131-67. On the decline of the state as the conceptual centerpiece of political science, see John Gunnell, "The




An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Constitutional Law by William Crane and Bernard Moses, published in 1884;34 An Examination of the Nature of the State: A Study in Political Philosophy by WW Willoughby, published in 1896;35 and, lastly J. Goodnow's Politics and Administration, published in 1900.36

Crane and Moses held that the study of politics, qua the study of the state, was

properly divided into two branches. The first, which the authors called

"analytical" politics, or the science of politics, deals with the development and structure of the state; and the second, "practical" politics, or the art of politics, deals with what the state should do. Goodnow also offered a two-fold structure, although his concerned the distinction between politics, understood as

determining the will of the state, and administration, understood as executing that will. Willoughby, by way of contrast, offered a tripartite scheme: "first, the determination of fundamental philosophical principles; second, the description of political institutions, or governmental organizations considered at rest; and

third, the determination of the laws of political life and development."37

Regardless of their differences, these divisions cannot be considered

equivalent to the subfields of contemporary political science because there was as yet no clearly defined discipline to subdivide. The primary epistemic aim of students of politics during the final quarter of the nineteenth century was to

distinguish the study of the state, that is, political science, from competing areas of inquiry, most particularly, history, philosophy, economics, and ethics. The

centrality of that aim was articulated by Willoughby, who, in a 1904 article

published in Political Science Quarterly, acknowledged that the "interests of

political science, political economy, and history are so closely related that an attempt to wholly separate them, or to pursue their study as absolutely independent subjects, would be as practically impossible as it would be undesirable." Immediately thereafter, though, he insisted that "intimate as are these relationships, the field of political science is one that may be clearly distinguished from that of history as well as from that of economics,; chiefly because its special concern is "with societies of men effectively organized under a supreme authority for the maintenance of an orderly and progressive existence."38

Declination of the 'State' and the Origins of American Pluralism" in Political Science in History, ed. J. Farr, J. Dryzek and S. Leonard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 19-40.

34. William Crane and Bernard Moses, Politics: An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Constitutional Law (New York: G. Putnam's, 1884).

35. WW Willoughby, An Examination of the Nature of the State: A Study in Political Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1896).

36. J. Goodnow, Politics and Administration: A Study in Government (New York: Macmillan, 1900). 37. Willoughby, An Examination, 382-83. 38. WW. Willoughby, "The American Political Science Association7' Political Science Quarterly 19

(March 1904): 107, 108. A similar argument had been advanced some two decades prior by Munroe




Consonant with Willoughby's aspiration, at an ever faster clip, early twentieth

century America witnessed a partitioning of knowledge among so many camps of specialists, each seeking to establish its exclusive rights over the field to which it staked a unique claim. To help secure those rights, various professional associations were invented. These inventions fostered the coherence and

autonomy of the disciplines, which, in a move that can only be regarded as

mythological, were often then credited with responsibility for creating these same associations. Robert Adcock explains: "The founding of the APSA in 1903 did not

give institutional substance to an already stable and delimited field of study Rather it marked, solidified, and helped to propagate a newly emergent scholarly identity-the 'political scientist, understood as pursuing a field of study distinct from that of the 'historian, 'economist, or 'sociologist."39 By the turn of the

century, the American Social Science Association (ASSA), founded in 1865 to ensure the integration of all knowledge regarding specifically human subjects, could no longer resist the centrifugal forces generated by this dynamic. In 1884, the American Historical Association broke away from the ASSA; the American Economic Association in 1885; the American Psychological Association in 1892; the American Anthropological Association in 1902; the American Political Science Association in 1903; and, finally, in 1905 the desiccated remains of this once inclusive association were officially reconstituted as the American

Sociological Association. Indicating that professional association most often furnishes the stimulus to departmental development, rather than vice versa,

political science acquired departmental status at the University of California in 1903; at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin in 1904; and at the University of Michigan in 1911. By 1914, a total of forty of 531 colleges surveyed by the American Political Science Association supported independent political science

departments (although another two hundred offered political science courses in more encompassing departments that also offered instruction in history, economics, ethics, sociology, and/or philosophy).40 However much liberal arts

Smith in "The Domain of Political Science:' Political Science Quarterly 1 (March 1886): 1-7. Although he

acknowledged the inevitability of considerable overlap with other social sciences, and in particular law and economics, like Willoughby, Smith's primary aim was to circumscribe the area of inquiry appropriate to political science by distinguishing its subject-matter and specifying its characteristic modes of inquiry The former he defined in terms of the study of the state, and the latter he defined in terms of historical and comparative analysis. Perhaps most significant for the purposes of this essay, Smith made no effort to subdivide the emerging discipline of political science.

39. Adcock, "Study of Politics in America,' 482. 40. The Teaching of Government (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 1. This volume consists of the 1914

"Report to the American Political Science Association by the Committee on Instruction" In 1960, in "Political Science as a Discipline: A Statement by the Committee on Standards of Instruction of the American Political Science Association," American Political Science Review 56 (June 1962), the APSA

reported that there were 466 independent political science departments, whereas 320 were still linked to

social science or humanities disciplines (417-21).




colleges might lag behind in this regard, by the outbreak of World War I, it was clear that political science had achieved sufficient critical mass to declare its

disciplinary autonomy.

Early Efforts to Secure the Discipline's Internal Borders

Attempts to organize the internal domain of political science, self-consciously construed in disciplinary terms, did not emerge until after formation of the American Political Science Association, and, even then, these early efforts secured no consensus. For example, in 1904, a vice-president of the newly created organization, Paul Reinsch, reported that the work of the APSA would be divided into seven "departments:" Comparative Legislation; Comparative and Historical Jurisprudence; Constitutional Law; International Law and Diplomacy; Political Theory; Administration; and, interestingly, Politics (which he defined as

study of "questions of political dynamics, such as the philosophy and methods of

parties, the choosing of political leaders, the influence of public opinion, and similar questions").41 Writing in the same year, in his capacity as the APSA's newly elected secretary and treasurer, Willoughby offered a slightly modified version of the tripartite scheme he had proposed eight years earlier in An Examination of the Nature of the State: political theory or philosophy, defined as the science of the state and its ends; public law, which included constitutional, international, and administrative law; and, finally, government, which he defined in terms of its different forms, the distribution of its powers, its various organs, and the

principles of its administration.42 Perhaps recognizing that in the early stages of a discipline it is sometimes politic to leave certain questions unanswered, Frank

Goodnow, in the APSA's inaugural presidential address in 1904, simply ducked the issue: "For it seems to me that such an attempt at definition is dangerous, particularly if it shall result in the endeavor to formulate a definition of Political Science which is at the same time inclusive and exclusive."43

Early efforts to secure agreement on the most apt way to construct a standard

political science curriculum for undergraduates fared little better. Most revealing in this regard are two reports issued by the APSA on instruction, the first in 1913 and the second in 1915. In a confessional mode, the 1913 report issued by the Committee on Instruction in Government began by noting that "at the outset of its

investigations the committee was informed on good authority that there is no such thing as political science, and as the work of examining college catalogues

41. Paul Reinsch, "The American Political Science Association," Iowa Journal of History 2 (1904): 157-58.

42. WW Willoughby, "The American Political Science Association,' in Discipline and History 60. 43. Frank Goodnow, "The Work of the American Political Science Association," Proceedings of the

American Political Science Association 1 (1904): 35.




progressed the truth of this observation became painfully apparent."44 In support of this dispirited assessment, the committee offered the results of its inquiry into the political science curriculum at 458 colleges and universities throughout the United States. That inquiry, whose conclusions uncannily parallel that of the 1991 APSA Task Force report cited above, generated no standard set of course

offerings; indicated no agreement on whether a basic introductory course should be required of all majors, let alone what its nature should be; and, finally demonstrated that because virtually all courses were designated as electives, the vast majority of political science departments failed to specify "a regular sequence of courses."45 Although disclaiming "any intention to prescribe a standard plan of courses in political science, which can be adopted indiscriminately by any institution,"46 the Committee nonetheless specified twelve courses, which., on its analysis, comprise the heart of political science; and it recommended that a full-year course on American government be prescribed as the basic introductory course for all undergraduates.47 Finally in a claim that is indicative of an institutional split that will become far more pronounced in decades to come, the report suggested that the training of government experts and those committed to research in political science should be "left

largely, if not entirely, with the universities," for "the function of college instruction in politics is to train for citizenship as well as to train for the professions."48

What chiefly distinguished the 1915 report of this committee, now titled the Committee of Seven on Instruction in Colleges and Universities, was its effort to

partition the principal courses of political science into a coherent classification scheme. In a very loose sense, this scheme might be understood as a progenitor of the contemporary subfields, but its content is quite different from that familiar to us today Specifically, the Committee proposed the following four-fold division of courses: (1) Descriptive and historical (including American government, national, state, and municipal; comparative government; party government; colonial government; and diplomacy); (2) Theoretical (including the introductory course in political science, political theories, and the history of political

44. "Report on Instruction in Political Science,' 255. 45. "Report on Instruction in Political Science," 258. 46. "Report on Instruction in Political Science," 254. 47. These courses, listed on page 255 of the Committee's report, include the following: (1) American

government; (2) General political science; (3) Comparative government; (4) Constitutional law; (5) Legislation and legislative procedure; (6) Administrative law and administrative methods; (7) Party government; (8) Colonial government; (9) International law and diplomacy; (10) Elements of law, jurisprudence and judicial procedure; (11) Political theories; and (12) Constitutional history and history of political literature.

48. "Report on Instruction in Political Science'," 264. See also "Political Science as a Discipline2' 418: "We believe that the small college has an educational contribution to make in our society, although this contribution in our judgment is often exaggerated. The small college is misguided in its efforts when it seeks to imitate a university in the scope and number of its course offerings"




literature); (3) Legal (including jurisprudence as well as constitutional, commercial, Roman, and international law); and, finally, (4) Special courses

(including legislation and legislative procedure, public administration, and

judicial administration).49 Unlike that familiar to us today this scheme carves out no separate domain for the study of American politics, lumping it together with

comparative government; its specification of law as a separate domain indicates

persistence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century's preoccupation with the state and the formal articulation of its will; and, finally, its category of

"special" courses, for which no explanation or justification is offered, appears to be either a catch-all container for (some but not all) formal governmental institutions or, less generously, something akin to "miscellaneous."

Disciplining the Scholarship of Political Science

To trace the discipline's move from these early inconclusive efforts to partition its internal epistemic space to successful consolidation of the contemporary four- subfield model, I have taken as an indicator changes in the way scholarship under review has been organized in the profession's official journal, the American Political Science Review, from its inception in 1906 to the present. This inquiry into the APSR's book review, book notes, and recent publications sections suggests that for half a century or more no single method of dividing the discipline's scholarship secured a clear consensus,5o and that it is only in the wake of the behavioral revolution in political science that the four-subfield model became

predominant.

49. Charles Haines, "Report of the Committee on Seven in Instruction in Colleges and Universities'," American Political Science Review 9 (May 1915): 356-57. For a chart indicating some of the other ways in which the discipline was internally divided between 1912 and 1973, see Wahlke, "Liberal Learning and the Political Science Major," 58-59.

50. My general conclusion regarding the absence of any consensus on this matter is confirmed by Harold Zink, who, in "The Growth of the American Political Science Review, 1926-49," American Political Science Review 44 (June 1950), classified the articles appearing in the Review during this period by subject-matter. Here, one sees a pattern of fluctuation that mirrors what I suggest below with respect to the journal's categorization of book reviews: "The early reports [of the APSR's editors] seem to indicate that no space was devoted to items in the American government field, as such, but this must be the result of the classification used. After blanks for 1906, 1911, and 1916 this category appears in 1920 for the first time with 32 pages; by 1925 it had fallen back to only 12 pages...As one examines the reports of the editors at 5-year intervals, it is apparent that some features have come and gone. 'Colonial Government, for example, appears only once in the first report, with two pages. 'Municipal Affairs' started out with 11 pages in 1906, increased to 47 pages in 1911, dropped out entirely in 1916, reappeared in 1920 with 22 pages, fell to 13 pages in 1925, accounted for 24 pages in both 1930 and 1935, dropped back to six pages in 1940, and disappeared entirely in 1945 and 1949. 'Public Administration' does not appear as a category prior to the Ogg editorship. In 1930 it received 19 pages of space; in 1935, 47 pages; in 1940, 54 pages; in 1945, 26 pages; and in 1949, it drew a blank. As in the case of 'Municipal Affairs: one should expect some coverage under American Government and Politics: 'Rural Local Government, like 'Public Adminis- tration, attracted comparatively little attention until the middle years of the Review" (262-63).




The first issue of the APSR employed no categories in organizing its book reviews, which appear in no particular order; and its list of recently published periodical articles in political science uses their titles in alphabetical order to

arrange its entries. However, in the second issue, published in February, 1907, although no categories order its book review section, the list of recently published literature is divided as follows: (1) Administration (which includes, among others, works on France, England, Belgium, the United States, Italy, Kentucky, and New York); (2) Colonies (which includes citations to work on

Algeria, Indo-Chine, German colonies in Africa, etc.); (3) Constitutional law; (4) International law; (5) Jurisprudence (which includes references to Roman, French, and Muslim law); (6) Political theory; and, finally, (7) Miscellaneous (which includes, among others, works dealing with Reconstruction in North Carolina, the history of the Papacy in the 19th century, the Railroad Rate Act of 1906, the annexation of Transvaal, organized democracy, and the "passing of Korea").

The salient points to note about this scheme include (a) the fact that three of its seven categories deal with law, which indicates persistence of the discipline's early preoccupation with the state and its will; (b) the presence of the category "Colonies," which is as much a political as an academic category in the sense that it reflects one of the foremost issues of public debate at that time; (c) the absence of a separate category devoted to American politics, as the research we would now group together beneath this heading is dispersed throughout this scheme; and (d) the fact that "Miscellaneous," in terms of the number of entries grouped together beneath this rubric, is one of the two largest categories, along with International Law This last point, I would suggest, indicates the fluidity of the

discipline insofar as much of the scholarship then published in political science, according to the APSR, could not be located unambiguously in any of its substantive categories, and that in spite of their very general character. (To appreciate the contrast of this scheme with that currently in use, as well as our attachment to the latter, it is sufficient, first, to ask how most contemporary political scientists would respond were their work to be relegated to the category of "Miscellaneous;" and, second, to note that today most of us would not find it

inordinately difficult to locate the 1907 articles appearing under this category within one of the principal subfields now employed to partition the discipline.)

In 1917, the categories employed to organize "recent publications of political interest" were modified as follows: (1) American Government and Public Law; (2) Foreign and Comparative Government; (3) International Relations; (4) Jurisprudence; (5) Local Government; and (6) Political Theory and Miscella- neous. Here, we see an intimation of what in time will become the subfield of American politics (which may well reflect the nationalism that accompanied U.S.

entry into World War I); the reduction of law to a single category (leaving aside the addition of public law to the category of American Government), indicating




erosion of the jurisprudential conception of the state; the elimination of the

categories of Administration and Colonies as well as the addition of Local

Government; and, finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the consignment of Political Theory to the category of Miscellaneous, following a brief period in which it disappeared altogether as a literature category (suggesting that those

partial to such inquiry had reason to grouse about their marginality long before the advent of behavioralism). These six categories prove quite resilient, enduring more or less unchanged until 1944 when the category of Political and Legal Philosophy was distinguished from that of Miscellaneous, although the latter

persisted until 1949 when it, along with the APSR's listing of recent publications, was consigned to the dustbin of history.

In the 1950s and 1960s, while book reviews remain consistently unorganized by category, still appearing in random order, the particulars of the scheme

employed to arrange entries beneath what was now labeled "Book Notes" fluctuate somewhat. Thus, for example, in 1960, its categories were as follows: (1) Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and Methodology; (2) Methodology and Research in the Social Sciences; (3) American Government and Politics; (4) Foreign and Comparative Government; (5) International Law, Organization, and

Politics; and, finally, (6) Other Books Received. In 1965, this pale heir of the Miscellaneous category disappeared, as did Methodology and Research; and, in the same year, Foreign and Comparative Government was re-christened as

Comparative Government and Cross-National Research, while a new category, Comparative Public Administration, was introduced. However, these slight mutations became ever less frequent, as the four-subfield scheme familiar to us

today began to displace all rivals. For example, a 1962 report issued by the Committee on Standards of

Instruction of the American Political Science Association stated that "political science as a discipline is ordinarily divided into four broad areas of study These are political theory, American political institutions and processes, comparative political institutions and processes, and international relations, organization and

law." The report then recommended that the undergraduate curriculum in

political science include, in addition to a general introductory course, at least one course in each of these subfields. Additional signs of this scheme's consolidation were evident in 1971 when these same four subfields were

incorporated into the APSR's Table of Contents (although the Book Reviews section remained a hodge-podge, joining together, for example, works on

political leadership in India, the political philosophy of Francis Bacon, elections in the United States, etc.); and still more so in 1972 when the distinction between book reviews and book notes was abolished, leaving only the former, all of which were now unambiguously situated in one of the four basic subfield

categories.




After 1972, although there were occasional but impermanent adjustments in these categories (e.g., between 1983 and 1986 Political Theory is eliminated and replaced by two categories, Normative Theory and Empirical Methods), the basic structure of the discipline, at least for the purpose of organizing its

scholarship, was essentially fixed. Indeed, the APSAs creation of Perspectives on Politics in 2003, in which the book reviews previously published in the American Political Science Review now appear, brought no reconsideration of the

adequacy of these categories (which, in pristine simplicity, are now listed as "Political Theory," "American Politics'," "Comparative Politics'," and "International

Relations"). Thus does the discipline's most recent scholarly endeavor, the product of extended and often contentious dispute within the APSA and among its membership, reproduce what its editor calls "the discipline's four traditional categories" (which, as my inquiry indicates, are neither as stable nor as timeless as this statement suggests), and that in spite of the intriguing (but apparently disregarded) question posed in its inaugural statement of

purpose: "Given that disciplinary and subdisciplinary fields are useful but sometimes inhibiting conventions, what do we learn by rejecting some of them?"51

Epitaph for a Monument to Successful Subfields52

How are we to account for the fact that the four-subfield model that now

provides the authoritative model for organizing the scholarship of political science and for giving structure to graduate and undergraduate programs made its initial appearance after World War II and was then consolidated over the course of the next two decades? This development, I hypothesize, reflects two

larger transformations of the profession, each of which has an intra- as well as an

extra-disciplinary dimension.

First, during the decades immediately following the war, the discipline became increasingly professionalized. Indicative of this transformation is the

adoption in 1949 of a new APSA constitution, which, among other things, provided for the establishment of a Washington, DC, secretariat, headed by an executive director who was assigned responsibility for developing the Associa- tion's professional and research services. As a result, Seidelman and Harpham report, by the early 1950s the APSA had changed "from a relatively loosely knit, decentralized association with reformist political tendencies into a more

51. Jennifer Hochschild, "Introduction and Observations,' Perspectives on Politics 1 (March 2003): 1, 4. 52. For the source of this section's title, see Robert Dahl, "The Behavioral Approach in Political

Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest ' American Political Science Review 55

(December 1961): 763-72.




centrally directed, non-partisan professional interest group."53 Everything Max Weber taught us about bureaucratic organizations suggests their tendency to

ossify over time. Hence, it should come as no surprise to learn that, as the APSA

sought to rationalize and standardize the profession, the less formal research and curricular traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would become reified in the form of obdurate subfields. However, to point to the

discipline's professionalization as an explanation for subfield consolidation does not, in and of itself, explain why these particular subfields came to hold sway That, Rogers Smith has argued, is best understood in terms of the nationalist sensi- bilities of American political science during the Cold War era. What he calls the discipline's "grand quartetS' that is, the four-subfield model, "articulates a

perspective in which politics takes place essentially within and between nation- states, with the United States as the paradigmatic nation-state, exceptionally exemplary of both democracy and capitalism. Our disciplinary fields label all other nation-states as having 'comparative' significance, or else they matter in their roles as international allies or adversaries of America, democracy, and capitalism."54 In other words, rather than standing as the discipline's fixed organizational categories, as Perspectives on Politics would have us believe, the current subfield model represents the institutionalized articulation of the specific configuration of

political forces that attended the rise of post-World War II nationalism, the

ascendancy of the American nation-state in particular, and the desire of American

political scientists to affirm the relevance of their scholarship to this configuration. The second post-war development that accounts for consolidation of the

present subfield model concerns the rise of behavioralism within the discipline. I have no intention of rehearsing that history in this context. For present purposes, suffice it to say that, although usage of the term extends back as far as the 1920s, behavioralism as a self-conscious intellectual movement emerged out of the Cold War as well as the post-war liberal consensus, accompanied by rapid growth in various hard and soft technologies, including the development of operations research, the advance of survey techniques, the invention of the computer and other data processing equipment. At much the same time, logical positivism, with its sharp delineation of fact from value, displaced pragmatism as America's dominant philosophical mode. Several consequences, notes Terence Ball, followed for the conduct of political science:

One was a turn away from the formal and legal analysis of institutions to a deliberate and self-conscious focus on actual political behavior. Another was

53. Seidelman (with Harpham), Disenchanted Realists, 155. 54. Rogers Smith, "The Politics of Identities and the Tasks of Political Science" in Problems and

Methods in the Study of Politics, ed. Ian Shapiro, Rogers Smith, and Tarek Masoud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46.




a decided preference for 'scientific' modes of inquiry and a suspicion bordering on hostility toward 'traditional' concepts (e.g., 'the state') and

approaches (especially political theory or philosophy). Thus began the 'behavioral revolution, which picked up steam and influence through the 1950s and peaked in the decade that followed. And, like all modern

revolutions, this one had its manifestoes and its own program for reforming and indeed remaking an ostensibly backward and dormant discipline.55

No doubt the most famous of these manifestoes was "The Behavioral Approach in Political Science,' in which Robert Dahl, writing in 1961, claimed that behavioralism would in time disappear as a distinctive way of studying politics not because it had failed, but because it would eventually succeed in defining "the main body of the discipline."56 Or, as David Truman had stated still more

emphatically a decade earlier, the behavioral approach should not be regarded as just another subfield in political science because it "represents an orientation or a point of view which aims at stating all the phenomena of government in terms of the observed and observable behavior of men. To treat it as a 'field' coordinate with (and presumably isolated from) public law, state and local government, international relations, and so on, would be to defeat its major aim. That aim includes an eventual reworking and extension of most of the conventional 'fields' of political science.'57

As has often been told, the hegemonic aspirations of behavioralism provoked considerable resistance within the discipline of political science, and that resistance was methodological as well as political. Some of that opposition stemmed from those who challenged behavioralism's epistemological preten- sions, and especially its claim to be able to discover cross-cultural laws of

political life.58 Others believed that behavioralism's commitment to value

neutrality rendered it ill-suited to contribute to political science's traditional role

55. Terence Ball, "American Political Science in Its Postwar Political Context,' in Discipline and

History, 210. See also 208: "The social sciences, and political science in particular, became increasingly prominent in the wake of World War II. The discipline owed its growing prestige to a number of

developments. The creation of the welfare state during the Great Depression of the 1930s, American

hegemony following the allies' successful prosecution of World War II, and the political climate of the Cold War created an atmosphere in which the claims of political scientists came to have a certain

appeal. Thus it is in the postwar period that we see for the first time the creation of an institutional

infrastructure-government granting agencies, private foundations, the modern multiversity, and the

increasing professionalization of the social sciences themselves-for supporting social science research and training" For another account of the broader political context out of which behavioralism emerges, see Gabriel Almond, "Political Science: The History of the Discipline," in New Handbook, 68-75.

56. Dahl, "The Behavioral Approach in Political Science,' 770. 57. David Truman, quoted in Dahl, "The Behavioral Approach in Political Science,"' 767. Emphasis

original. 58. See, for example, John Gunnell, "Deduction, Explanation, and Social Scientific Inquiry"

American Political Science Review 63 (December 1969): 1233-58.




as educator of citizens.59 And still others contended that behavioralism's

employment of positivist methods, what Sheldon Wolin called its "methodism;' left it unable to grasp the import of political movements that fundamentally challenged the prevailing order.60 While proponents of this last claim castigated behavioralism for being insufficiently democratic, students of Leo Strauss and others took the reverse tack by criticizing behavioralism for mirroring in its intellectual commitments "the "dangerous proclivities of

democracy."61 By the mid-sixties, suggests Dwight Waldo, these conflicts had so transformed

the discipline that one "could not speak in any meaningful sense of 'sides' or

'victories': political science had become too complex, arguments too subtle, opinions too tempered, emotions too exhausted.'62 The aftermath of that exhaustion was evident in David Easton's 1969 APSA presidential address. There, a political scientist who, arguably, had fired the opening salvo in the post-war behavioral revolution with publication of The Political System in 1953, confessed that the discipline was now defined not by "behavioral orthodoxy," but by ever more trenchant critiques of it. Considered together, those critiques offered a

damning portrait of a discipline whose quest for methodological orthodoxy had

generated nothing so much as political obtuseness and intellectual irrelevance. "How," Easton asked,

can we account for the failure of the current pluralist interpretation of

democracy to identify, understand, and anticipate the kinds of domestic needs and wants that began to express themselves as political demands during the 1960s? How can we account for our neglect of the way in which the distribution of power within the system prevents measures from being taken in sufficient degree and time to escape the resort to violence in the

expression of demands, a condition that threatens to bring about the deepest crisis of political authority that the United States has ever suffered? How can we account for the difficulty that political science as a discipline has in

avoiding a commitment to the basic assumptions of national policy, both at home and abroad, so that in the end, collectively, we have appeared more as

59. See, e.g., Christian Bay, "Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical Evaluation of Some Behavioral Literature," American Political Science Review 59 (March 1965): 3-51.

60. Sheldon Wolin, "Political Theory as a Vocation," American Political Science Review 63 (December 1969): 1062-82. See also the essays in Philip Green and Sanford Levinson, eds., Power and Community. Dissenting Essays in Political Science (New York: Random House, 1970).

61. See, for example, Herbert Storing, ed., Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1962), 326.

62. Dwight Waldo, "Political Science: Tradition, Discipline, Profession, Science, Enterprise" in Handbook of Political Science, Vol. I, 61-62. For much the same claim, see James Farr, "Remembering the Revolution: Behavioralism in American Political Science" in Political Science in

History, 199: "The

quieting or perhaps the exhaustion of these proclamations characterize the postbehavioral era in which we arguably still reside"




apologists of succeeding governmental interpretations of American interests than as objective analysts of national policy and its consequences?"63

In response to these multiple failures, located within a political context marked

by race riots, assassinations, anti-war protests, and the threat of nuclear war, Easton declared that political science was now entering, however uncertainly, a

"post-behavioral era." Although reluctant to specify the principal tenets that would define this era, Easton avowed that they would include an acknowl-

edgment of the fact that all research, no matter how dispassionate, is ultimately rooted in certain evaluative assumptions; an attentiveness to the most urgent political crises of the day; a tolerance for multiple approaches in their analysis; and, above all else, a commitment to "creative speculation about political alternatives in the largest sense.l64

Yet the promise that Easton ascribed to the "post-behavioral era,' most now

agree, has proven something of a bust. Labeling it "the decade of disillusion- ment," David Ricci has argued that in the 1970s much of the discipline remained wedded to behavioral techniques, "while at the same time losing faith in the

larger professional outlook" that once animated their deployment. During this same decade, moreover, "no one succeeded in publishing a comprehensive and

widely acceptable work explaining how bits and pieces of political science research, such as the outpouring of policy studies, could be brought together by the community of scholars in comprehensive and useful form."65 Arguing in a similar vein, James Farr has suggested that "as a credo or a positive doctrine, 'postbehavioralism' did not galvanize the discipline.. .Temporally speaking, political science is still in a nominally postbehavioral era, without the

overarching organization or intellectual vigor of a post-behavioralism-or any other 'ism' for that matter."66 Heinz Eulau perhaps best expressed the sentiment of the now disillusioned when, in 1977, he bemoaned "the drift of a discipline."67

63. David Easton, "The New Revolution in Political Science'," American Political Science Review 63 (December 1969): 1057.

64. Easton, "The New Revolution:' 1058. Writing two decades later, in "Political Science in the United States: Past and Present" in Divided Knowledge, ed. David Easton and Corinne Schelling, (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1990), it would appear that Easton was no longer so sanguine about the prospects of letting a thousand disciplinary flowers bloom: "There are now so many approaches to political research that political science seems to have lost its purpose" (143).

65. Ricci, Tragedy of Political Science, 211. 66. James Farr, "Remembering the Revolution,' 219-20. In a similar vein, in "Science, Non-Science,

and Politics" in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), Rogers Smith writes: "Postbehavioralism is best understood as describing a time period not an intellectual school or approach" Furthermore, the "various protests swept together by the label have little in common beyond some enemies," and "much of political science continues as it did before" (132).

67. Heinz Eulau, "Drift of a Discipline:' American Behavioral Scientist 21 (September/October 1977): 3-10. The "drift" that Eulau refers to in this essay had measurable organizational implications. As Joseph




It is within this context, I would suggest, that we locate the subfields that now define the organizational logic of the discipline. What we confront today is perhaps best labeled a post-behavioral stalemate. Within the discipline as a whole, on the one hand, that stalemate is reflected in the proliferation of what the APSA calls "special fields,' a proliferation that is guided by no apparent logic, no

prevailing orthodoxy, and no unified conception of the discipline. On the other

hand, through various mechanisms, but most particularly through the structure of

undergraduate and graduate programs in political science as well as through the

APSA's assignment of scholarship under review, the discipline continues to afford

privileged status to a small set of subfields. Those subfields, which Seidelman and Harpham aptly characterize as "respectable political science cul-de-sacs in which the semblance of academic community [can] be rekindled through the

avoidance of disturbing questions,"68 were consolidated in the wake of the conflict spawned by the behavioral revolution and express the tacit compromises that attended collapse of that revolution's disciplinary ambitions.69 To attribute to these subfields any more gravity or fixity than this account suggests is to engage in disciplinary myth-making. To fail to critically assess these subfields is to permit relics of the Cold War era to circumscribe the professional study of politics, even as its best scholarship chafes beneath (or, perhaps better still, simply disregards) these archaic categories.

Conclusion

If Donald Freeman, in his 1991 review of the discipline's history, was correct to claim that an academic discipline, like a sovereign state, "needs an identity, boundaries, control over those who practice within its ranks, a commonly accepted language, and a measure of respect from others who share the world within which the discipline is practiced,"O7 then perhaps political scientists are academic equivalents of the state-less peoples of the world. Or, perhaps, Brian

Losco points out in "Whither Intellectual Diversity in American Political Science? The Case of APSA and

Organized Sections," PS: Political Science & Politics 31 (December 1998), between 1974 and 1982 individual memberships in the American Political Science Association declined by nearly a third (839).

68. Seidelman (with Harpham), Disenchanted Realists, 221. 69. Evidence to support this contention, with respect to the subfield of political theory, is provided

by John Gunnell in his The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Much of the behavioral revolution was marked by an attack on more traditional conceptions of theory and, more particularly, by an effort to supplant that conception of

theory with one that was positivist in orientation and scientific in aspiration. Consolidation of an

organized subfield of political theory is, on Gunnell's account, largely the fruit of a defensive response to this threat; and its success is reflected by, for example, the founding of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought in 1967, creation of the journal Political Theory in 1973, and, finally, by formation of the APSAs Foundations of Political Theory program section in 1988.

70. Donald Freeman, "The Making of a Discipline" in Political Science: Looking to the Future, 18.




Barry was closer to the mark when he proposed that the discipline of political science is akin to a confederation comprised of so many academic departments whose only internal common denominator is the shared rubric that yokes our courses to one another in college and university catalogs, and whose only external bond is that furnished, however tenuously, by the American Political Science Association.7 No matter which of these accounts is most apt, the state of the discipline since its inception appears to mock the pretense implicit in books

bearing titles such as Political Science: The State of the Discipline.72 Yet, at the same time, this appearance of disunity, which has generated so

many laments in recent decades, is belied by the rigid structure of university graduate programs in political science, by the political science curriculum at liberal arts colleges, and, lastly, by the employment of the four-subfield model to

organize its scholarship. This paradox, Laurence Veysey argues, has been one of the defining features of the contemporary world of academia at universities and

colleges alike since at least the 1920s: "Definiteness and coherence pertained to the standardized external forms that came into being, while heterogeneity marked the subject-matter and, to some extent, the vocational composition of the

membership. Segmentation and a certain uniformity thus seemed to go hand in hand."73 Indeed, more than going hand in hand, the uniformity cited by Veysey is a bureaucratic response to such segmentation. And if that is the case, then, ironically and perhaps especially so for the author of the present essay, "the

organization of modern political science may triumph over its original functions, becoming a mode of discourse of and for itself"'74

When the partisans of no one mode of inquiry within political science are able to secure control of the official apparatus of the Association, and no single intellectual approach is clearly predominant throughout the discipline, the result is an unstated policy of haphazard accommodation. Or, to put this otherwise, and while I do not mean to underestimate current efforts by the proponents of rational choice theory to secure hegemony over the discipline, one might say, as did Seidelman and Harpham in 1985, that "the response of political scientists to the collapse of pluralist theory in the polity has been to implement pluralist rules of the game within the discipline itself. Mathematical modelers, Soviet specialists, students of Hobbes and few radicals-each group possesses its own disciplinary interest groups, complete with journals, panels, and accommodating letters from

friendly specialists during tenure decisions."75 It is not clear, however, that such

71. Brian Barry, "Do Neighbors Make Good Fences? Political Theory and the Territorial Imperative," Political Theory 9 (August 1981): 293-301.

72. Ada Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline. 73. Laurence Veysey, "Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities," in Organization of Knowledge, 69. 74. Seidelman (with Harpham), Disenchanted Realists, 240. 75. Seidelman (with Harpham), Disenchanted Realists, 189.




pluralism, rooted in professional differentiation and sustained by an ethos of liberal tolerance, fosters much in the way of genuine intellectual confrontation.

Indeed, much like the pluralist account of politics, such tolerance may serve to

de-politicize the study of politics by disguising the appearance and dampening the articulation of latent but very real conflicts within the discipline. The normalization of such de-politicization is apparent, to cite but one example, in the APSAs recently issued pamphlet titled "Political Science: An Ideal Liberal Arts

Major," which states that the "undergraduate study of politics usually consists of courses on American politics, comparative political systems, international

relations, political theory" and, lastly, acknowledging the positivist aspirations that continue to define much of the discipline, "methodology." Here, what might otherwise be an issue of intellectually fruitful contestation within the discipline assumes the form of a bland claim, which, although appearing to be merely descriptive, is in fact a performative statement that ratifies and perpetuates a

particular way of ordering the academic enterprise of thinking about politics.76 Such de-politicization is also arguably accompanied by a reprise of the sort of

irrelevance that so worried David Easton. If Rogers Smith is correct in claiming that the substantive subfields that now dominate political science are so many memorials to the Cold War, and if the residual effects of that conflict are ever less salient in shaping the contemporary political world, then scholarship that is informed by these subfields runs a real danger of anachronism. More specifically, it is not clear that a set of categories that privileges the nation-state as a political form (indeed, a set that carves out an exceptional status for one nation-state in

particular) can effectively grasp, to quote Michael Shapiro, "the flows of people, technologies, capital, images, and ideas that are part of rapidly increasing global cultural transactions,' and that are now "creating a different and nonstatic

planetary map...The hegemony of the state has existed not only in its political and administrative control over its spaces and populations, but also in its

privileged place in the discourses and literatures of global representation."77 A

profession whose organizational structure frustrates inquiry into this newly emerging planetary map has only itself to blame if it ends up on the sidelines.

76. That the present subfield structure is now creaking under its own weight is indicated by the ever

larger number of requests from students, at the graduate as well as undergraduate levels, to create

"special fields:' whether these be in gender politics, race and ethnic politics, or whatever: "As these demands accumulate," suggests Rogers Smith, in "The Politics of Identities," "they provide evidence that the time when the prevailing field structure served the discipline's analytical purposes well is passing, if indeed it ever really did so. By reifying a certain subset of political identities as all-important, that structure now stands in the way of even asking, much less answering, all the questions that should concern us in the contemporary world" (52).

77. Michael Shapiro, "Introduction to Part I," in Challenging Boundaries, ed. Michael Shapiro and

Hayward Alker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-4.




As these reified subfields take on lives of their own, we become enforcers

patrolling and fortifying borders that, apparently, we can no longer do without. Part of their persistence is an effect of bureaucratic inertia, but their durability is also a function of the way they have become constitutive of our very identities as professional political scientists. As such, these categories are tenaciously defended (or simply accepted uncritically), often by those whose scholarship and teaching ill fits their confines. It is such conservatism that is articulated within an organizational structure that denies the incoherence of the discipline in order to sustain the apparent integrity of the subject matter that furnishes its raison d'etre and, in so doing, prevents our students, and perhaps us as well, from

catching on to the truth about political science.



Documents

Kaufman 2006. Dividing the Domain of Political Science