Robert Adcock - The history of political science

The History of Political ScienceRobert AdcockStanford University

Mark BevirUniversity of California, Berkeley

The history of political science serves as a context within which we make sense of the natureand role of our discipline. Narratives about the past development of British and Americanpolitical science help to frame debates, choices, and identities within the contemporary dis-cipline in Britain. What do recent studies on the history of political science tell us about thecharacter of political science in Britain and America? What do they suggest about the rela-tion of the British study of politics to British identities more generally? Our review of recentwork concentrates on three issues: (1) how historical studies of political science relate toapproaches and identities within the contemporary discipline; (2) how they relate to the past,i.e. whether their historical vision is marred by presentism; (3) whether they look beyond theboundaries of the discipline.

It is now forty-five years since Bernard Crick published The American Scienceof Politics (Crick, 1959). Crick’s view of American political science did much toset the terms in which many British political scientists understand themselves.In this view, American political science has fallen prey to a false scientism thatseeks universally applicable general theories, a scientism that arguably masksits actual role as an American ideology, an ideology that Crick suggested borea striking resemblance to the totalitarianism it purported to oppose. The Britishstudy of politics is viewed, in contrast, as sensitive to historical and cultural par-ticulars; it embodies the defence of politics against the ideology of scientism(Crick, 1962).1 The unquestioned influence of Crick’s work makes it all the morestriking that so little work has been done in Britain on the history of politicalscience in the last forty years. What is more, the rise of the history of politicalscience as a distinctive sub-genre in America might appear to belie thedichotomy of American scientism and a British sensitivity to history. What doesrecent work in the history of political science tell us about the character ofpolitical science in Britain and America? What does it tell us about the relationof British political science to English and British identities?

Past and PresentThe impact of Crick’s work illustrates how the history of political science servesas a context within which we make sense of the nature and role of the disci-pline. It is, at least implicitly, a source of our disciplinary identity. Even so, thereare, of course, students of politics who believe that the history of the discipline

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW: 2005 VOL 3, 1–16

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2 ROBERT ADCOCK AND MARK BEVIR

has little to offer current practitioners. Political scientists might dismiss disci-plinary history as of mere antiquarian interest if they consider the discipline tobe a cumulative science dealing in general patterns and relationships that recurwithin a given domain. Equally, political theorists might dismiss it as a distrac-tion from the epic ideas that constitute the perennial subject matter of philo-sophical speculation. Despite such exceptions, many students of politics believethat knowledge of history and politics are closely related. We have alreadyremarked on the role this belief has played in the self-understanding of manyBritish students of politics. Similarly, several of the most prominent contempo-rary movements in American political science are avowedly historical: neo-statists and historical institutionalists have presented themselves, for severaldecades, as offering historically sensitive alternatives to the formalist excessesof behavioralism and, more recently, rational choice theory.

Those political scientists who avow that knowledge of history and politics areclosely related have shown surprisingly little interest in historicizing their owndiscipline. The belief that the political scientist must also be in part a historianof politics surely makes most sense as part of a broad and consistently appliedhistoricism. Such historicism goes beyond exploring how the content and char-acter of politics changes over time, as political actors build upon and remakethe legacies of the past. It also reflexively extends its historicist perspective tothe knowledge and practices of political scientists themselves. Just as politicalactors work from a background of historically given practices and beliefs thatthey interpret and refashion in their actions, so do political scientists. A keyrole is played in both settings by narratives of the past that serve to framedebate and choices in the present. These narratives may remain stable for sometime. They may be perpetuated over successive cohorts. They may even cometo appear almost self-evident. One such narrative is that of genteel ‘Britishdecline’, a narrative that was widespread among British political elites throughthe twentieth century (English and Kenny, 2000). Another is that of a genteel‘British study of politics’, a related narrative that is equally widespread amongBritish political scientists, and one that took comfort in Crick’s opposition toAmerican scientism.

We want to review several recent publications that illustrate the current stateof work on the history of political science in Britain and America. Our reviewwill concentrate on three issues. First, we are concerned with how historicalstudies of political science relate to the approaches and identities found withinthe discipline. Do they provide them with historical support, or do they offera revisionist challenge to them? Of course the roles they play depend not onlyon their own content but also on the audiences who read them. Their impactcan thus vary across time or place. We might suggest, for example, that Crick’sstudy challenged those American scholars who sought to craft a science ofpolitics on the model of the natural sciences, while reassuring British scholarsthat they did well to stick with their established practices and resist the luresof the American alternative. If this first issue directs attention to how histori-cal studies relate to the presuppositions of a given audience, a second issueconcerns how they relate to the past. A recurring worry is that studies maysuccumb to ‘presentism’. They may narrate the past in a fashion that engages

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present-day debates at the expense of pursuing an adequate understanding ofthat very past.2 Such presentism need not involve a conscious promulgation ofmyths. It may also involve a selective recounting of decontextualized slivers of the intellectual past. Or it may describe the past in terms of anachronisticconcepts that misshape its texture and significance. While efforts to make thepast speak to current debates can result in a problematic presentism, they neednot do so. To the contrary, Crick’s study illustrates, at least in our opinion, thepossibility of a lively engagement with present-day concerns that builds uponhistorical understanding rather than bypassing or foreclosing it.

Our third issue is how historical studies treat political science as a discipline.Some of these studies take the discipline as a coherent intellectual unit suitedto characterization in the aggregate. Others do far more to cover terrainbeyond the discipline’s institutional boundaries, as well as to explore differ-ences within these boundaries. Crick’s study again nicely illuminates our con-cerns here. While it is sometimes read as giving an aggregate account of theAmerican discipline, Crick himself disavowed such a goal; he emphasized thathe offered a ‘critical history of an idea in a particular country, not of a disci-pline or profession’ (Crick, 1959, p. v).3 Crick traced the origins and conditionsof the idea of a science of politics modeled on the natural sciences. In doingso, he directed his attention beyond the boundaries of political science, for hemainly turned to sociologists to trace the roots of this idea. The American dis-cipline does not appear in Crick’s study as a coherent intellectual unit charac-terized in the aggregate by such scientism; it appears instead as an institutionalsite that has been increasingly penetrated by scientism at the expense of oldermodes of thought. Crick’s genealogy set out to defend these older traditionsagainst the rise of scientism, not to submerge this contrast beneath a mono-lithic image of the discipline. His attention to cross-disciplinary exchanges andintra-disciplinary conflicts was, however, lost on readers who interpreted thebook through a disciplinary lens that elides discrepancies between the textureof intellectual life and the structure of the institutions within which so muchof that life has come to be conducted. Such elision is a recurring feature of dis-ciplinary identities, which privilege one intellectual tradition by equating par-ticipation in that tradition with leadership, perhaps even membership, of theguild of political science.

British HistoriesAlthough British students of politics often define themselves as more histori-cally sensitive than their American counterparts, they have shown little inter-est in the history of political science. When they do produce work on the historyof political science, it often consists of luminaries looking back on their ownlives and those of their teachers and predecessors in an attempt to trace theintellectual and institutional origins of the discipline and to assess the progressit has made. The most prominent recent example of such work is perhaps theBritish Academy centenary monograph on The British Study of Politics in theTwentieth Century edited by Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown.Although some essays in the volume are exceptions, the overall tone is of


luminaries celebrating the past (Hayward et al., 1999).4 Such work usually pro-duces a naturalizing perspective in which political science appears as consti-tuted by a pre-given empirical domain – politics – and a shared intellectualagenda – to make this domain the object of empirical study. It inspires histo-ries that focus on the establishment of an autonomous discipline, that tell ofan initial optimism evolving into a more stolid professionalism, and that high-light the emergence of professional norms and institutions.5 Instead of playinga revisionist role, it often reinforces received disciplinary identities, such as thatof a historically sensitive British study of politics. It tends to a selective presen-tism that celebrates established scholars and ideas, such as S. E. Finer in com-parative politics or the English School in international relations, while givingscant attention to participants in other traditions who, while institutionallywithin the discipline, are not part of the memories that frame contemporaryidentities therein.

An instructive alternative to this naturalizing perspective is provided by the historicism of Julia Stapleton and her doctoral supervisor, Stefan Collini. Stapleton’s recent book, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britainsince 1850, illustrates many of the more significant contrasts (Stapleton, 2001). Stapleton’s meticulously researched and argued book describes the strong tradition, albeit one in decline, of intellectuals drawing sustenance from thesense of an English or British identity. It extends her earlier argument that polit-ical thought has played a role on a par with that of literature as vehicle andguardian of national identity (Stapleton, 1994). Political Intellectuals sets outfrom an examination of the Victorian roots of this tradition of the nationalintellectual. Stapleton shows how the tradition arose as British intellectualssought to respond to issues they believed were posed by the rise of democracyand especially the Second Reform Act. National intellectuals aspired to takecharge of the national culture so as to counteract the dangers they associatedwith democracy, notably demagogic manipulation and social divisiveness. Theyhad a broadly shared sense of a British identity that they tried to promote andreproduce through publicly accessible scholarship. A. V. Dicey, James FitzjamesStephen, Leslie Stephen, J. R. Seeley and others all promulgated a vision of aunified Britain characterized by a strong moral sense, a love of liberty, a respectfor justice and fair play, and a stout manliness. Interestingly, Stapleton doesnot remark on the implicit contrast between the homogeneous visions of thesenational intellectuals and the divided nature of the democracy they sought tocounteract. Might it be that they belonged to a homogeneous clerisy that wasunder threat from the rise of other classes and groups?

Stapleton then proceeds to provide a terrific analysis of the fate of the tradi-tion of the national intellectual in the inter-war years. She distinguishes herebetween two overlapping tendencies. Some intellectuals responded to theglobal issues of the time – fascism, communism, and one should add economicdepression – with grand theory. A. D. Lindsay, T. S. Eliot, John Strachey andAlfred Zimmern appear as intellectuals who adopted more cosmopolitanvisions or prophetic tones; they made sharp criticisms of their fellow nationals’inherited practices, local identities and everyday experiences. Other intellectu-als responded to similar dilemmas by reasserting a national perspective against


just such grand theory. Arthur Bryant, John Betjeman, G. M. Trevelyan, A. L.Rowse and others fostered those ideas of an English or British character thatplayed such a hugely important role in marshalling civilians during World WarTwo and informed large parts of the national consciousness of middlebrow,middle England in the post-war era. The chapters on these ‘English perspec-tives’ are probably the most interesting in the book. Stapleton tackles herethinkers who are rarely explored by political theorists. While her own work alsousually concentrates more on rather high intellectual culture than on socialmovements, Stapleton here locates the conservatives who are in many waysthe heroes of this book by engaging in a more cultural style of history, explor-ing the National Book Association and a host of relatively modest, quiet, andobscure intellectuals. It appears to be conservatives, who in the context of thetwentieth century, are most in need of rescue from the enormous condescen-sion of posterity. In rescuing them, Stapleton joins those students of politicswho emphasize, often in the wake of Thatcherism, the persistently conserva-tive nature of the British people. But whereas most of these others are cos-mopolitan social democrats trying to explain what otherwise seems too abrupta halt to the forward march of labor, Stapleton comes close to celebratingvisions of middlebrow decency, village cricket, parish churches, and warm beer.She begins and ends her book by explicitly juxtaposing the tradition of thenational intellectual who is embedded in local identities with the multiculturalcosmopolitan beliefs that she believes dominate Britain today.

We have suggested that the historicism of Stapleton and Collini generates adifferent stance toward the discipline of political science from that of the nat-uralizing perspective. They are wary of postulating some given empiricaldomain or shared intellectual agenda as a defining feature of a discipline. Theythus have turned the constitution of a discipline from an assumption or evena fulfillment into a problem. ‘Disciplines are unstable compounds’, as Collinirecently put it, since ‘what is called a “discipline” is in fact a complex set ofpractices, whose unity, such as it is, is given as much by historical accident and institutional convenience as by a coherent intellectual rationale’ (Collini,2001). Therefore, we might argue that the creation of an apparently givenempirical domain and a shared intellectual agenda arise as the contingentvictory of particular intellectual traditions that often legitimate themselves pre-cisely by telling the history of the discipline as if their own assumptions wereunproblematic. When historicists such as Collini and Stapleton portray disci-plines as unstable, they draw attention to the dangers of an excessive focus onthe idea of a discipline (compare Collini, 1988, pp. 387–99). Disciplinary histo-ries risk privileging the category of the discipline as if its institutional presence– the Political Studies Association or membership within departments of poli-tics – demarcated boundaries to the flow of ideas, or explained the ways inwhich ideas have developed within such boundaries. In contrast, Collini andStapleton show an admirable interest in the mutual exchanges between politi-cal science and, say, literature and history. Here Political Intellectuals exploresthe impact of T. S. Eliot, Rowse, and Bryant on Englishness and politics. Whatis more, because historicists treat disciplines as problematic, they often useother aggregate categories to convey generalizations that cover multiple


authors. Historicism encourages us, we might suggest, to deploy concepts suchas tradition, language or discourse; while these traditions might parallel theinstitutions of a discipline, they also might parallel the contours of particularsub-fields, or cut across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries. Here Politi-cal Intellectuals explicitly traces what Stapleton calls a ‘tradition’ of nationalintellectuals, an aggregate concept that covers, as we have seen, various poets,historians, philosophers, journalists and others, as well as the occasional teacherof politics.

Stapleton’s Public Intellectuals illustrates how historicism can lead to narrativesof the history of political science that stand in contrast to those generated bya more naturalizing perspective. Her historicism reflects, we would suggest,that of the approach to intellectual history associated with Quentin Skinner, J.G. A. Pocock and Collini, that is to say, those who have been labeled the Cam-bridge School. Its ‘informing spirit’ is perhaps what Collini has described as ‘theattempt to recover past ideas and re-situate them in their intellectual contextsin ways which resist the anachronistic or otherwise tendentious and selectivepressures exerted by contemporary academic and political polemic’ (Collini,2000, p. 14). Perhaps, though, it is time that we began to disaggregate thenotion of a Cambridge School since the intellectual historians who are pur-portedly covered by this term differ from one another in important respects.In particular, we here might distinguish Skinner’s advocacy of a distinctivemethod and republican politics from a strand of intellectual history, also muchfavored by Cambridge folk, that embodies a Whiggish preference for style andparliamentarianism: whereas Skinner defends his method and politics in prin-cipled, abstract, and even universal terms, Collini and Stapleton exhibit a Whig-gish distrust for abstractly stated principles, preferring to locate their insightsand politics in local practices. Collini dismisses ‘coordinated programmes’, ‘pro-grammatic manifestos’, ‘methodological programmes’, and ‘tight conceptualschemes’ by suggesting that they are rationalistic fads that artificially imposeinappropriate generalities on our practice. He champions ‘a certain deliberateeclecticism’, ‘a matter of tone and level of treatment’, ‘common preoccupa-tions’, ‘similar dispositions’, where the content of such things is presumably leftunspecific precisely because of a Whiggish distrust of general principles (Collini,2000, pp. 13–15).6 Stapleton, likewise, presents Political Intellectuals as adefense of local and concrete, rather than abstract and universal, commit-ments. She appears to identify with her national intellectuals, who mine localtraditions and identities to find the wisdom therein.

A Whiggish proclivity appears in various emphases in the narratives told byCollini and Stapleton. It appears, first, in a preference for high culture. Theirwork concentrates on public intellectuals and Oxbridge academics who them-selves remained influenced by Whiggism, while giving relatively little attentionto such other figures as autodidacts, socialists, and utopian visionaries.7 WhileWhiggish views are most clearly articulated by Collini with regard to mattersof method, in Stapleton’s work they take on a more clearly politically sub-stantive form. At times she appears to share the almost supercilious disdaintowards democracy and ordinary citizens that she and Collini ascribe to thoseabout whom they write. Her sympathy seems to lie with those aristocratic


Whigs and liberals in academia and politics who we allegedly need. Stapletonapplauds her national intellectuals whose self-appointed ‘custodial role’ was‘to introduce aristocratic virtues into democracy’ (Stapleton, 2001, p. 15). As wesuggested earlier, there is a tension between the claim to speak for a nationand the conviction that aristocratic Whigs and liberals in academia and politicsshould ‘assert their independence from the popular movements and sectarianinterests of a modern democratic society’ (2001, p. 13). Does speaking for thenation actually mean defending an aristocratic ethos against the rise of theplebian masses? If so, does this mean the plebian masses are a danger to anation of which they presumably are not a part?

The Whig orientation of Collini and Stapleton appears, secondly, in the nos-talgia that pervades their work. Because Whiggism and aristocratic liberalismfell into precipitous decline early in the twentieth century, those who stillremain faithful to them almost always look back with nostalgia to a time when they stood firm before the onset of modern democracy. Stapleton thusidentifies a ‘malaise’ in political theory in the 1920s largely with the decline of liberalism. She echoes Keynes’s complaint that liberalism was eclipsed bysocialism, which he dismissed as ‘a force led by “sentimentalists and pseudo-intellectuals” ’ (2001, p. 59). There appears to be a longing here for the more austere, manly liberalism – dare we say, muscular Christianity – of lateVictorian liberals. Nostalgia for Whiggism and aristocratic liberalism appears in a somewhat different vein in Collini’s writings, where it is often temperedwith an ironic detachment, perhaps reflecting recognition that such beliefs and ideals are markedly out of synch with modern politics. It is difficult perhapsto be passionate about ideas one knows to be inadequate for our times.

Collini and Stapleton exhibit an attachment to Whiggism or aristocratic liberalism, finally, in their preoccupation with Englishness and the content they ascribe to it. Englishness is, Stapleton suggests, ‘restrained rather than belligerent, inclusive rather than exclusive, and social rather than political inem-phasis’ (2001, p. 2; see also Collini, 1999). She concludes with a pean to theEnglish virtues of moderation and toleration as ways of accommodating difference:

Earlier political theorists in Britain were alive to the importance ofnational and cultural difference, and emphasized the benefits ofcontact and fusion. However, they were wary of politicizing ‘differ-ence’, believing in an English/British model of the state that had keptsuch matters largely under political wraps ... They sensed well enoughthe dangers of fragmentation and conflict that would inevitablyaccompany the ascendancy of groups whose aims were limited andwhose methods were belligerent ... They confined their enthusiasmfor ‘difference’ to the (by now) relatively mundane level of ‘liberalpluralism’ – the right to maintain an identity that has been largelyconstructed out of resources internal to it, but within a wider publicconfiguration in which it can expect to find few echoes ... The senseof caution, distrust of excessive particularism and wider public rolefor public intellectuals that such a devotion to England/Britain


inspired is worth remembering, even at this late juncture for ‘oldBritain’ (Stapleton, 2001, pp. 198–9).

What, though, of other types of Englishness, from the National Front to pro-Europeans? Why is the ‘true’ Englishness that found in Whiggism and aristocratic liberalism? Stapleton might reply that history reveals England to havebeen dominated by such Whiggism. But this reply would require some justifi-cation, especially as she herself argues that much of the relevant parts of Whiggism arose as a defense of an aristocratic ethos against the popularmovements of modern democracy.

Even as Collini and Stapleton offer us sophisticated, historicist alternatives toa naturalizing perspective on the history of political science, so their Whiggishsympathies lead them to recount narratives that exhibit nostalgia for a highculture of liberal learning. Stapleton evokes such nostalgia in her evident sympathy for intellectuals who propounded the familiar narrative of an‘English exceptionalism’ that exhibits ‘opposition to the “abstract”, intellectu-alist values which were often deemed responsible for the political travailsabroad’ (Stapleton, 2001, p. 114). This narrative clearly overlaps with those bywhich British political scientists often make sense of themselves in contrast totheir American counterparts. What should we make of this overlap? Is it pos-sible that British political scientists understand themselves in terms set by aWhig account of English exceptionalism? After all, the British study of politicsis defined as methodologically eclectic, moderate and sensitive to local con-texts; it is contrasted with the dogmatism, scientism and rationalism of anAmerican political science that is supposedly enthralled by rigid conceptualstructures and programmatic manifestos. It is interesting to note here that Stapleton’s nostalgia seems to extend from the intellectual tradition of Whiggism to an idealized Westminster Model of British government. Sheappears, like so many British political scientists, to endorse Sir Ernest Barker’spleasure in a parliamentary system in which issues are resolved as in a debat-ing chamber. She evokes a time ‘before parliament became simply a seal onpolicies which had been worked out previously by specialist ministers, civil servants and interest groups’ (Stapleton, 2001, p. 12).8

American HistoriesThe history of political science in Britain is limited in several senses, all of whichare highlighted by a comparison with the state of affairs on the other side ofthe Atlantic. The first limitation is of number. Historical studies that address thepast of American political science in one fashion or another have appeared reg-ularly for decades. There has been a plethora of such studies published in thelast year alone. The second limitation concerns the variety of scholars produc-ing such studies. Work on Britain has consisted in retrospectives by disciplinaryluminaries and historicist studies by intellectual historians. In America, thesetwo approaches are supplemented by a growing sub-genre of studies writtenfrom within the discipline but by scholars outside of its limelight. The third limitation appears in the overlap between Stapleton’s and the disciplinary lumi-naries’ visions of a distinctive British approach to the study of politics. While


Stapleton’s study diverges from the luminaries’ naturalizing perspective – shecarefully avoids presentism and she helpfully aggregates intellectual conversa-tions across disciplines – her study echoes their image of the past and it therebysupports a received disciplinary identity rather than challenging it. In contrast,American studies provide us with diverse images of the past, some with revi-sionist implications and some without.

The most recent of the ‘State of the Discipline’ volumes that appear everydecade or so under the auspices of the American Political Science Associationmay suggest that luminaries of the American discipline have little interest inthe history of political science (Katznelson and Milner, 2002). But this trend is not without exceptions. To the contrary, one of the volume’s co-editors, Ira Katznelson, has recently published a study of post-World War II scholar-ship, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (2003). Unlike other studies by luminaries,Katznelson’s book does not take the discipline as its aggregate intellectual unit. Instead it crafts and deploys the ‘political studies enlightenment’. This category groups together a cross-disciplinary set of scholars, notably HannahArendt, Karl Polanyi, David Truman, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell,Charles Lindblom and Robert Dahl. Katznelson presents these scholars assharing a common response to the dilemmas posed by total war, totalitari-anism, and the holocaust; they all turned ‘to the social sciences and history inan effort to deepen and guard the tradition of Enlightenment’ (2003, p. xii).He locates this response in contrast to that of ‘rejectionists’ who responded tothese dilemmas by rejecting the Enlightenment.9

Desolation and Enlightenment is decidedly presentist in approach – we mighteven say proudly so, if we were sure it was a self-conscious authorial choice.Katznelson makes very little effort to establish the historical intentions of thefigures incorporated within his ‘political science enlightenment’. He does notdocument, for example, whether they understood their own agenda as one ofreviving ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead he concentrates on representing theirworks as exemplary for those who might take up just such an agenda today inresponse to contemporary postmodern skepticism. We would suggest thatKatznelson’s study pivots upon a belief that today’s historical institutionalistsshould take a leading role in this agenda, and a worry that they are hinderedin doing so by their dismissive images of the scholarship that arose in the wakeof World War Two. In the 1970s and 1980s, dismissive images of this scholar-ship helped to make attempts to combine an analytical temperament withbroad historical perspective, and to make the state a center of attention,appear exciting and novel. Katznelson now puts aside, and at times explicitlychallenges, the images that supported this sense of novelty among his fellowhistorical institutionalists. He thereby offers a new vision of the intellectualpast, a vision in which the members of his ‘political studies enlightenment’emerge as nothing quite so much as proto-historical institutionalists.

Katznelson fleshes out his new vision in the second and third chapters of Deso-lation and Enlightenment. These chapters strike us as a mixed bag. The thirdchapter addresses scholars, largely political scientists, at Columbia and Yale, and


it is the highlight of the book. Katznelson deftly signals that behavioral – erafigures such as Truman, Lasswell and Dahl shared the concern of today’s his-torical institutionalists with viewing the dynamics of the modern liberal statein historical and analytical perspective. Moreover, since the scholars discussedin this chapter interacted and influenced one another, Katznelson’s groupingof them proves historically informative. Alas, the elements that make this thirdchapter work are absent from Katznelson’s problematic second chapter, whichfocuses on Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Arendt’s The Origins ofTotalitarianism. Katznelson’s reading of these books as pursuing analyticalsocial science in a manner akin to that favored by historical institutionalists isstrained at best. There is scant ground for interpreting these works with thecategories of today’s historical institutionalism. There is scant ground, too, forgrouping Polanyi and Arendt alongside the other members of Katznelson’s‘political studies enlightenment.’ Both Polanyi and Arendt, each in their ownway, steer well clear of the modernist epistemology and liberal presuppositionsthat constitute the continuities between today’s historical institutionalists and behavioral-era scholars that Katznelson captures so well elsewhere in hisbook.

The presentism of Katznelson’s book makes it a prime example of exactly thekind of studies that John Gunnell has sought to supplant. Gunnell has been aleading figure in promoting disciplinary history as an emerging sub-genre ofspecialized research within American political science. He champions the goalof a body of researchers, committed to anti-presentist standards, and pro-ducing historical studies with an increasing degree of autonomy from theheated ebb and flow of agendas in the contemporary discipline. Gunnell’s particular version of anti-presentism receives an extended articulation in theappendix to his new book, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science andthe Discourse of Democracy (2004). Although some aspects of Gunnell’s visionare contested by other contributors to the sub-genre that he has done so much to promote, what is most noteworthy in contrast to the British scene issimply that this sub-genre exists within the disciplinary institutions of politicalscience.10

Gunnell rightly identifies Crick’s book as having played a foundational role inshaping the conversation of this sub-genre. His own new book offers, we wouldsuggest, an attempt to shift that conversation onto a new set of topics. Imag-ining the American Polity breaks clear of the long shadow cast by Crick’s book,and more broadly, of the behavioral-era debates during which it appeared.Gunnell does this by pointedly taking changing conceptions of democracy,rather than scientism, as the orientating concern of his scrupulously researchedstudy. This move involves more than just a change of theme. Gunnell’s studyseeks to establish that inter-war and post-war developments in the Americandiscipline are narrated better in terms of a contest over the meaning of democ-racy than in terms of the rise of scientism (2004, pp. 24–5, 133 and 219–21). Hisbook is especially informative and persuasive with regard to the interwarperiod. A pre-occupation with scientism has narrowly focused most prior studyof this period onto the Chicago school. Imagining the American Polity, in


contrast, covers far more of the discipline as it tracks the debate over new pluralist conceptions of democracy and the related crafting of a distinctiveAmerican notion of liberalism. It offers telling evidence in support of its read-ing of these movements as far more central to the mainstream of interwar disciplinary debate and development than the scientism then flourishing inChicago.

Gunnell’s novel, a compelling account of the interwar period, makes his booka landmark study of the history of American political science. An overplayingof his hand leads, however, to some weaknesses in the book’s relatively briefertreatment of later developments. Gunnell almost inverts the presentist ten-dency to project later concepts and contentions back onto earlier scholars inthat he projects interwar concepts and debates forward a little too hastily.Scholars from the behavioral-era to today are presented as echoing interwarintellectual moves, regardless of whether they are indebted to those earlierdiscussions or not. Gunnell’s concern to find echoes is far from as egregiouslyde-historicizing as most presentist predecessor hunting, but it does submergesomewhat the contexts, concerns, and conceptual nuances of more recentscholarship.

If we step back to consider Gunnell’s book alongside Katznelson’s, we find itstriking that, despite their divergence with regard to presentism, there arenoticeable parallels between them with regard to the issue of revisionism. Bothauthors challenge common images of the discipline’s past. Katznelson queriesthe reputed ahistorical, anti-institutionalist character of behavioral-era work.Gunnell suggests that interwar debates over democracy and liberalism, not the supposed ‘revolution’ of the behavioral-era, mark the most significanttransformation that American political science has ever undergone (2004a, b).Yet in neither work does this contestation over the past support much in the way of a sharp revisionist challenge to approaches prominent among American political scientists today. Katznelson’s work does offer historical insti-tutionalists something of a new identity, but the potential shifts involvedremain largely at the level of legitimating rhetoric; they entail no major shiftin the way research is practiced or its purpose conceived. Gunnell’s work doesconnect with present scholarly debates, but primarily by way of questioningwhether they are as novel as they are sometimes taken to be, a query that, asvalid as it certainly is, does not articulate a clear agenda for a major change ofapproach.

For an example of how the historical study of political science can lead to achallenging revisionist stance, we would recommend a third new book, IdoOren’s Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of PoliticalScience (2003). Oren frames his study in relation to the paradoxical self-imageof American political science: the discipline sees itself as, at once, both ‘anobjective science independent of its national origin and historical context,’ andas committed to ‘freedom and democracy’ (2003, pp. 1, 7). The explicit aim ofOren’s book is to undermine this self-image. Oren queries how committed tofreedom and democracy the American discipline has been in practice, and


above all, challenges its claim to objectivity. He argues that the discipline is ide-ological in the sense that it is ‘human thought that avoids reflection upon thecircumstances in which it is embedded or the interest it serves’ (2003, p. 172).He supports this interpretation with historical mini-narratives that seek toestablish a recurring association between the content of disciplinary discourseand shifts in American foreign policy. Oren’s mini-narratives explore politicalscience before and after America’s entry into conflicts with imperial Germany,Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia. They suggest that characteriza-tions of these countries swung from being uncritical or even positive to becomesharply negative. There is, we would suggest, some room to quibble overwhether Oren’s pattern is quite as good a fit in each of these cases as he makesout. Thus, for example, disciplinary discourse critically treating Germany andRussia as ‘totalitarian’ has origins before the onset of World War II, let alonethe Cold War with which Oren associates it. However, while some such quali-fications might be needed to add a bit more historical nuance to Oren’scompact account, the basic thrust of his interpretation strikes us as largely rightand its implications for the contemporary field well worth pondering. Particu-larly engaging is Oren’s attention to major changes in the way that Americanpolitical scientists have defined democracy with its content curiously shiftingover time so as to emphasize similarities between the US and its allies, and contrasts with its rivals. As Oren points out, these shifts have some major im-plications for how we understand the kind of knowledge constructed fromAmerican data sets, such as the finding of a ‘democratic’ peace.11

Oren’s attention to changing conceptions of democracy sets up his book as anexcellent companion to Gunnell’s Imagining the American Polity. The twobooks illustrate the vibrancy of the growing sub-genre of disciplinary historiesbeing written by American political scientists. They also point to some of thespace for methodological debate within this sub-genre. Not only is Oren’s bookmore revisionist than Imagining the American Polity, it also diverges from the‘internalist’ stance favored by Gunnell, who is wary of locating disciplinaryshifts relative to broad external contexts. The fact that both books overlap intheir concern with changing views of democracy provides readers with an excel-lent opportunity to reflect upon how differences in approach relate to sub-stantive conclusions. However, rather than weighing in here with our ownviews on the long running, and rather tiresome, debate over internal versusexternal approaches, we would like to direct attention to a further issue. What-ever their differences, Oren and Gunnell both employ a move that is perhapstoo dominant in the sub-genre they contribute to. Both adopt the discipline astheir primary unit of intellectual aggregation. They thus frequently makeclaims characterizing the discipline as a whole; sometimes going so far as tosuggest a quasi-agency in which ‘political science’ does or responds to thingsas a singular actor. Such an approach can encourage a retrospective down-playing of past diversity within political science. It can also encourage histori-cal narratives that give short shrift to the role of extra-disciplinary intellectualexchanges in the development of political science.

As in Britain with the work of Collini and Stapleton, so in America, it is intel-lectual historians who most often write studies that are both non-presentist


and trans-disciplinary in their approach. Two new books provide excellentexamples: S. M. Amadae’s Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold WarOrigins of Rational Choice Liberalism (2003) and Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of theFuture: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2003). Both of these booksgrew out of dissertations supervised by the leading American intellectual his-torian, David Hollinger. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that they displaymarked similarities of approach. Both authors devote careful attention to thework of individual scholars while also self-consciously employing aggregatecategories. Both offer an overview of the post-war development of an im-portant trans-disciplinary theoretical agenda: Amadae tracks rational-choicetheory, while Gilman explores modernization theory. Both span the spacebetween the work of individual scholars and these aggregate agendas byattending to various institutional sites of interaction. Amadae identifies theRAND Corporation as the most important site for the crafting of rational-choicetheory, while also exploring the Public Choice Society and the political sciencedepartment at the University of Rochester. Gilman’s account of modernizationtheory focuses on Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, MIT’s Center forInternational Studies, and the Social Science Research Council’s Committee onComparative Politics. When Amadae and Gilman interpret the work of indi-vidual scholars, they thus do so, not primarily in relation to disciplinary affilia-tions, but in relation to aggregate theoretical projects and institutional sites ofintellectual interaction. The result in each book is a fascinating narrative of justthe kind of trans-disciplinary developments that largely elude histories framedaround disciplines. While political scientists interested in the history of theirfield might, at first sight, overlook Mandarins of the Future and RationalizingCapitalist Democracy because they are only partly devoted to political science,it is precisely their trans-disciplinary approach that makes both these books vitalsupplements to the kind of disciplinary histories offered by scholars such asGunnell and Oren.

Amadae and Gilman alike concentrate on the 1950s and 1960s. Mind you, they do not limit their attention to those decades. When they look forwardfrom them, Gilman closes with chapters on the ‘collapse’ and ‘aftermath’ of modernization theory, while Amadae closes with one on the ‘consolidation’ ofrational-choice theory. The different long-term fate of these two post-war the-oretical projects has distinctive ramifications for each book. In particular, thecontinuing vigor of the rational-choice project enables Amadae’s work to takeon dimensions not available to Gilman. Making deft use of her skills as an intel-lectual historian, Amadae directly engages some of the haze of contesting perceptions at play today in the continuing debate over rational-choice theory.The third part of her book is devoted to careful rebuttals of the view that rational-choice theory is a continuation or revival of older approaches. Againstsuch a view, Amadae argues that rational-choice theory diverges at key pointsfrom both the classical liberalism of Adam Smith, and the marginalist approachto economics inaugurated in the late nineteenth century. Her book provides a persuasive case for seeing rational-choice theory as a distinctively post-WWII creation. And her retracing of the theory’s interdisciplinary origins out-side of mainstream economics challenges contemporary assertions about the


imperialism of economics. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy ably illustratesthe potential of non-presentist historical inquiry to bring valuable clarity topresent-day debates.

Perhaps no book is without some weaknesses. We would suggest that the mostnotable flaw in Amadae’s book concerns the way that she deploys the ColdWar as an external context against which to interpret the development of rational-choice theory. Interestingly, Amadae here employs the same externalcontext that Gilman relies on in his account of modernization theory. Bothbooks share a tendency to narrate the intellectual agenda they study as if itwere the main or obvious response of American social scientists to this context.Yet a juxtaposition of the two books makes clear that there was little overlapbetween the two projects they narrate. To the contrary, their basic assumptionswere in conflict at key points. This conflict suggests to us that each authormight have paid more attention to contingency and contention in the waysthat American social scientists interpreted and responded to the Cold War.When read as a pair, Amadae and Gilman’s books, like those of Gunnell andOren, thus offer insights above and beyond those offered by either alone.

ConclusionWe can pair readings of studies that overlap in substantive focus but divergein approach (as with Gunnell and Oren), or studies that overlap in approachbut diverge in focus (as with Amadae and Gilman) only if there are multipleworks in the first place. Perhaps it would be too much to call for historical workon the British study of politics to become as profuse as that now found onAmerican political science. Surely, though, a few more such studies would bemerited. If they appear, perhaps they might follow some of the trends we havehighlighted with respect to the three issues raised at the beginning of thisreview. First, they might follow the lead of Amadae and Gilman as well asCollini and Stapleton in eschewing a distorting presentism. Second, they mightfollow the same leads in adopting a trans-disciplinary orientation. Finally,perhaps they might adopt a revisionist stance, as does Oren, so as to challengethat Whig narrative of a genteel British science of politics that Collini and Stapleton appear to share with their more presentist and discipline-orientatedcounterparts.

Revisionism might challenge Whiggish accounts of British political science and,indeed, English and British identities more generally. Stapleton speaks for intel-lectuals who ‘serve their nation, attempting to ensure its survival and integrityagainst those who would attenuate its deepest cultural foundations in theinterests of more inclusive and expansive social ideals for which the majorityof their fellow countrymen feel little sympathy’ (2001, p. 5). In contrast, re-visionist histories might reveal the contingent and contested nature of the allegedly deepest cultural foundations to which she refers. Stapletonactively champions an English, even British culture, which she describes in theWhiggish terms of an evolving, tolerant, liberal, perhaps aristocratic characterthat avoids the snares of rationalistic programs.12 Revisionist histories mightrescue challenges to this culture and also suggest how it has served to obscure


or legitimate various forms of social exclusion. Stapleton concludes by callingfor a return to a concept of national citizenship in contrast to a multiculturalismthat demonizes the ‘inherited culture’ thereby seeming ‘to license the exag-geration of its “otherness” in relation to those groups resisting their alleged“marginalisation”’ (Stapleton, 2001, pp. 191–2). In contrast, if revisionist his-tories portrayed national concepts of citizenship as contingent and contested,and if they showed how these concepts have excluded various others, theymight thereby lend support to a more open, multicultural Britain.

(Accepted: 22 July 2004)

About the AuthorsRobert Adcock, Department of Political Science, Encina Hall West, Room 100, Stanford Uni-versity, Stanford, CA 94305-6044, US; email: [email protected]

Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, US;email: [email protected]

Notes1 When Mark was an undergraduate in the UK – more than twenty years after this book was pub-

lished – he took a compulsory, first year ‘Introduction to Politics’ course for which it was still theset text.

2 For a classic explication of this concern see Stocking (1965).

3 See also Crick’s explanation of why the bulk of his earlier chapters are focused outside the dis-cipline itself: ‘If we have taken a long and circuitous journey towards American political scienceitself, it is because none of those things that predisposed it towards the “scientific method” arosefrom within itself’ (1959, p. 95).

4 For an earlier discussion of this book see Bevir (2001). Readers interested in the history of Britishpolitical science might also consult Dunleavy, Kelly and Moran (2000). While not itself a history,this volume collectts together a valuable selection of classic articles from the last fifty years ofPolitical Studies with some accompanying commentary.

5 For an American example of this naturalizing perspective see Somit and Tannenhaus (1967).

6 Although Collini is explicitly characterizing the work of John Burrow, Donald Winch and himself,the characterization appears to us to fit his own work far better than it does that of the othertwo. Similarly, the literary and political sympathies he thus invokes appear to us to be notice-ably truer to the work of one of his coeditors (Brian Young) than to the other (Richard Whatmore).

7 Such other figures are addressed, but only to a limited extent, in Stapleton (2000).

8 Of course, the appeal of the Westminster Model to Whigs and liberals is, at least in part, that itoffers the political elite a certain independence from popular movements within democracy.

9 Katznelson identifies Leo Strauss and the Frankfurt School as exemplars of this response. SeeKatznelson, 2003, pp. 33–43.

10 The new books of Gunell and Oren reviewed were the two latest additions to this developingsob-genre other contributions in the last decade or so have included Adcock (2003) and Schmidt(1998).

11 Oren’s book actually developed out of his earlier work on this specific topic. See Oren (1995).

12 ‘In this country, social and political stability has depended greatly upon the entrenched charac-ter of the latter [the majority or mainstream culture]; never exclusive or static, it has – with skilfulcultural articulation and adaptation – absorbed elements previously shunned. ... It would bewrong to assume that this culture is or once was wholly inclusive; public cultures can never besuch and are therefore constantly open to the charge of being unrepresentative. If sufficientlybroad and well established, and therefore secure, they can, however, tolerate a wide range ofpractices and beliefs’ (Stapleton, 2001, p. 6).


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Stocking, G. (1965) ‘On the Limits of “Presentism” and “Historicism” in the Historiography of theBehavioral Sciences’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1 (3), pp. 211–18.

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Robert Adcock - The history of political science