7 - A Disciplinary History of Disciplinary Histories

Summary

Each generation redefines its own image of political science.

David Easton (1953, p. 148)

The phrase “political science” has been in use since the eighteenth century (Farr 1988b). From its first uses in the Scottish and French Enlightenments into the late nineteenth century, it carried a wide and practical meaning. Political science in this older sense encompassed multiple areas of focused knowledge and skills – such as political economy, jurisprudence, and history – and involved applying one or more of these areas to inform practical judgments about what was possible and preferable in matters of present-day politics and policy. Political science in this sense was exemplified by Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835/1840 Democracy in America (2000, p. 7), and later expounded by him in his 1852 address as president of France’s Académie des sciences morales et politiques (Tocqueville 2010). The wide practical science Tocqueville exemplified in France was just as prominent in Britain. When introducing their history of the ‘science of politics’ in nineteenth century Britain, Collini, Winch, and Burrow (1983, p. 3) observed wistfully, however, that the science they had surveyed “no longer appears on modern maps of knowledge, at least not as the extensive though vaguely delimited empire it once was.”

Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the older wide and practical sense of political science gave way to a new, narrower, and professionalized sense that maps “political science” onto just one of the array of research-centered academic disciplines collectively labeled as the “social sciences.” Where the wide sense had been born in Europe and exported to America (where it was also standard into the 1880s, and in some settings longer), the narrower sense that supplanted it was developed in early twentieth century America, was later exported to Europe, and is today globally dominant. If we inquire into the history and historiography of “political science,” and, in doing so, use the phrase in its now dominant disciplinary sense, then we direct attention to studies largely focused upon developments in America’s academy or their overseas offspring. Most such studies are disciplinary, not simply in the figures and agendas they focus upon, but in their authorship and audience: They are written by members of the discipline, and for members of the discipline. These disciplinary histories of political science are the subject of my chapter.