the european geneses of american political science
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Abstract Although American political science is, as Bernard Crick emphasised, in many respects a distinctly American science of politics, its evolution has been deeply informed by European ideas. This was quite obviously the case during the nineteenth century, when the German concept of the state dominated the discourse of the field, as well as in the early part of the twentieth century, when English scholars made significant contributions to the theory of democratic pluralism. By the middle of the century, German ´migre e ´s had contributed to a fundamental transformation in political theory which challenged the mainstream vision of political enquiry; but what is less well understood is the extent to which the reaction to this challenge in behavioural political science was also based on ideas that were the product of the European exodus.
Keywords
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philosophy; political science; political theory
he theme of this essay can be stated very succinctly, albeit paradoxically. While political science has been a distinctly American social science, its evolution, except for a relatively brief period, has taken place within the discursive context of European concepts. This was particularly true during the nineteenth century, but by the middle of the twentieth century, at which point American political science was being widely exported and imported, the subfield of political theory, which had long represented the discipline’s voice of identity, was being transformed by the impact of European e ´migre ´ scholars who critically engaged with the discipline’s com-
mitments to science and liberalism. Although this latter development has, at least in general terms, been widely acknowledged, there has been little recognition of the fact that the mainstream discipline’s reconstruction and defence of its image of science was also once again cast in terms that were European in origin. Political science in the United States, from its beginnings, was not simply an American version of a more universal or generically defined form of political enquiry. It was, as Bernard Crick (1959) so accurately noted, a uniquely American species of social science. As a differentiated, self-ascribed, and institutionalised disciplinary species, it originated in the european political science: 5 2006
(137 – 149) & 2006 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/06 $30 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
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United States and both reflected and valorised American political values and government. Eighteenth-century European and American references to ‘political science’ and a ‘science of politics’, by writers such as David Hume and in works such as the Federalist Papers, had little to do with what would emerge, by the middle of the nineteenth century, as the study of political science in American colleges and universities. The conceptual content of the American science of politics, as it first took shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, was distinctly European – and largely German. The root of this paradox is in part simply the continge
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