Abstract: Political science is once again rediscovering its past and retelling its history. In last few years several works have brought an end to an era when our discipline's historical reflections were limited to rather brief presidential addresses of American Political Science Association, to even briefer literature reviews that prefaced articles in professional journals, and to never brief contributions to that more general enterprise of history of political thought, from Plato to Pareto. Indeed from late-1950s to mid-1980s, works in history of political science stand out by their sheer rarity (among them, Somit and Tanenhaus, 1967; and, more narrowly, Kress, 1973, and Karl, 1974). As authors of one such work pointed out in 1967, this had taken its toll: Most American political scientists are largely unfamiliar with origins and early evolution of their discipline. . . . An adequate history of field has yet to be written; and available literature . . . affords at best fragmentary and partial account (Somit and Tanenhaus, 1967, p. 2). By contrast, earlier political scientists were rather (though not exceptionally) more historical in their disciplinary self-understanding. For those writing in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was perhaps consequence of their being more historical in general about scope and methods of political science. This was view, at any rate, of Francis Lieber, first officially named Professor of Political Science in United States, position granted him by Columbia College in 1857. This was also message of Frederick Pollock's 1890 Introduction to of Science of Politics, as well as of J. R. Seeley's motto: History without Political Science has no fruit; Political Science without knows no root (1896, p. 3). While Charles Merriam later would brook none of this historicism in study of politics (at least once he deserted comparative-historical methods of his teacher William A. Dunning), his majestic pronouncements on discipline of political science were nonetheless cast in historical terms when in 1925 he spoke of New Aspects of Politics emerging from the recent history of political thinking (1925, ch. 3). In same year, and with less recent past in mind, Robert H. Murray prefaced his of Political Science from Plato to Present with observation that there was not a single controversy of our day without pedigree stretching into distant ages (1925, Preface). The 1930s allowed for pedagogical reflections of historical kind by Anna Haddow on Political Science in American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1900 (1939). Even opening salvos of behavioral revolution in early 1950s were fired by competing narratives of history of political science. In The Political System, David Easton's (1953) behavioral program for general systems theory
Publication Year: 1988
Publication Date: 1988-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 65
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