The political science discipline has twice in the past generation faced an insurgency that combined methodological and ideological critiques—the first coming from the Caucus for a New Political Science in the 1960s and the second coming from Perestroika in the 1990s. A comparison of these two eras raises intriguing questions about the role of political scientists as advisors, policy makers, and critical thinkers in a democratic society. One can imagine many roles. Political scientists can emulate the Shakespearian fool, speaking truth to power without any chance of exerting authority, and protected from retaliation for unwanted views by their political irrelevance and university tenure. Alternatively, they can insert themselves invisibly in the circles of power (as do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, at least in Tom Stoppard’s eyes), best to hear without mediation (and without influence) the way policy gets made and to report to others the true machinations in the centers of power. As a third model, now relying on the role of Lewis Eliot in C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers novels, political scientists can insert themselves in those very corridors and subtly yet resolutely infuse new perspectives into the democratic process. Finally, they can serve as political activists, as did political theorists Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar lecturing before adulating audiences on the University of California–Berkeley campus in the late 1960s. They drew analogies between the egregiously failed campaigns of General Maxwell Taylor (in Vietnam) and Alcibiades (in Syracuse) to mobilize the student masses against a war that was destroying an established democracy rather than constructing a new one. Here political scientists were combining politics with vision. This was the spirit of the New Caucus.

Nostalgia today for the spirit of the 1960’s Caucus, however exciting it was, is misplaced. The public role of the political scientist is, and should be, dependent on the broader political context. A changed political context demands different roles for scientists in their orientations toward power.

The era of the Caucus was one in which the U.S. government, in the name of anti-communism, secretly overthrew democratically-elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, and Chile. It was drafting young American men in the hundreds of thousands to fight a war to suppress an insurgency that had far more legitimacy in Vietnam than the puppet governments that American power was inserting. Several of the former confederate states of our union were resisting the fulfillment of voting rights to African-American citizens. Young Americans organized to provide tools to our unregistered citizens to assert their rights in a way far more resolute than did the federal government, unwilling to upset structures of oppression in the American south. Anti-communism and racism were sustained by powerful elites impervious to reason and protest.

Sadly, in this context, American political scientists were effusive in their appraisals of American democracy. Robert Dahl discounted the possibility (save in rare instances) of an ideal democracy anywhere, and argued that the polyarchy (a sort of diminished democracy) that America had achieved was a descriptive model of success. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba glorified America’s “civic culture” which was far better than one that promoted full participation of all in a democratic process. And Kenneth Waltz was writing (in a period where American planes were defoliating Vietnamese farms) that the international system in which we lived, and the nuclear bombs we invented, were affording us a thankful era of peace. No wonder young political scientists would accuse the disciplinary establishment (and the methods on which they relied) of compromising with power. ^{Footnote 1} The Wolin/Schaar stance of political activism—one in which disciplinary cozying up to power was exposed—was certainly appropriate. ^{Footnote 2}

Political science’s perestroika arose in the waning year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. A quite different set of challenges faced our nation: growing inequality, ecological threat, and an emerging Islamicist challenge to secular dictatorships in the Middle East and the Western governments that supported those dictatorships. But to put this last threat in a nutshell, Osama bin Laden was no Ho Chi Minh. For all the brutality of communist regimes throughout the world and the brutality involved in fighting an insurgency first against the French and then the Americans, Ho sought legitimacy among his own population and was intent on governing them. It was impossible for fair-minded analysts to see the National Liberation Front as a threat to the world in which we lived. Yet embedded in our foreign policy establishment was a resolute ideology of anti-communism that was resistant to fair minded criticisms of its inhuman excesses.

After 9/11, in contrast, few Americans—not even Jane Fonda—could stomach an image of cheering on the Islamicists organized around al-Qa’ida. Moreover, despite the deliberately deceptive intelligence that justified the war in Iraq, and the unbearable scenes of torture in prisons overseen by U.S. forces, few Americans were on the side of Saddam. The war to overthrow him was immensely imprudent, revealing both ignorance of the social cleavages in the Arab world and a considerable degree of post-Cold War hubris. But there was hardly an elite consensus blind to the failures of our occupation. In fact, both the Pentagon and the CIA reached out to the social science community in search of a way out of their military morass. ^{Footnote 3} On the domestic front, the liberation of women and gays is proceeding without an Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas, ordering his minions to hose down activists seeking to advance their liberationist agendas. To be sure, economic inequality today rivals the injustices of the 1960s in terms of human suffering. But, as sadly seen in the “Occupy” movement, ignorance about proper remedies rather than resolute elite action holds back reform. ^{Footnote 4} In our era of lingering perestroika discontent, there is no embedded structure of power deaf to protest and reason. In light of this different context, what critical message linking American political science to power is appropriate?

To answer this question, consider Max Weber’s distinction between the “ethic of responsibility” and the “ethic of ultimate ends” that he draws in his “Politics as a Vocation” lecture from 1919 in a moment of revolutionary student ferment in Germany. ^{Footnote 5} The ethic of responsibility takes into account the likely consequences of the means that are oriented towards desired ends to see if those means can be justified. The ethic of ultimate ends uses direct means even if those means undermine the desired ends. Although Weber derided those who abided by the ethic of ultimate ends as political “infants,” he recognized that in certain times there is hardly an alternative course. He tragically sees this possibility when opponents to power can reasonably retort, should their political action backfire tragically, that “the world is stupid and base, not I.”

From a perspective of the Caucus years, and blind to the logic of cause and effect, activists blocked the entrance of the Oakland induction center only to have their heads smashed with police batons, voted for “Peace and Freedom” (the party of candidate Eldridge Cleaver), and engaged in other such acts even if they would bring the more Hawkish candidate for President (Richard Nixon) into power and thereby delay the inevitable acknowledgement of American defeat in Vietnam, thereby adding tens of thousands of cruel deaths to the cost of that war. And activists registering African-Americans in the south were morally justified even if it would provoke deathly violence. These social movements appeared obvious answers to a state impervious to political reason. Indeed, if the evils of government action were so deeply embedded in American institutions, undermining the structures sustaining them rather than altering policies seemed compelling. Here, an ethic of ultimate ends, an ethic that was derided by the leading political scientists of that time, does not seem infantile, but historically sound. And the call for methodological diversity in political science was equally sound, with the goal not so much to advance knowledge, but to undermine the complicity of our discipline with unyielding structures of power.

An ethic of ultimate ends in today’s world, one without a resolute class of politicians blind to public outrage, cannot be justified. Here the ethic of responsibility ought to be preeminent. For that, in Weber’s words, “what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life.” This implies a disciplined approach to the consequences of our political actions. In our era, the political science discipline, with its methodological obsession to trace the consequences of political treatments, has relevance for the vocation of politics. In our discipline, many are seeking to develop techniques to determine such things as how best to incentivize the unrepresented to vote; how best to win hearts and minds in the battlefield against murderous fanatics without killing the innocent; and how best to integrate culturally despised immigrant groups into modern democratic polities. ^{Footnote 6}

Any reader of our journals will know that our techniques are jejune and our answers insufficiently cogent. But what is the alternative? Railing against American imperialism, American failures to fully accept gay marriage, American heartlessness in ignoring the long-term plight of the unemployed, has little value. Movements such as “Occupy” drawing attention to inequality can hardly demand tearing down the Fed. After having raised public consciousness about the skewed income distribution in our country, which it has successfully done, it must identify the mechanisms driving the separation of the top one-tenth of one percent from the rest of the population. The organization “350” seeking to bring rapid change in environmental policy cannot beat their collective heads against a resolute structure of polluters as no such structures have compelling force; rather they need to think beyond changes in public consciousness of long-term threats and begin to advocate a program of policy transformation. In partnership with organizations such as “350”—or the International Crisis Group promoting the responsibility to protect citizens all over the world against torture—political scientists can now deploy their disciplinary tools to help learn what policies work best to maximize societal impact.

In sum, there is one form of politics justified when the principal enemies are within embedded structures that are resistant to change (i.e., an ethic of ultimate ends). And another form of politics is justified when the centers of power are diffuse, open and ineffective (i.e., an ethic of responsibility). I make no claim as to whether we live in more or less evil times; and I don’t want to say that the political science discipline has miracle tools. Nor do I want to claim that useful answers are on the horizon. As Weber warned, political action guided by an ethic of responsibility is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Finally, I make no claim that the present disciplinary leaders in political science are optimally deploying their tools to resolve fundamental problems. Rather we have some tools to advance an ethic of responsibility, and we shouldn’t shy away from or seek to discredit them. And as long as the dominant voices in political science refuse to accommodate themselves to the realities of structural evils, our discipline can advance even in more challenging times.

From this viewpoint, the Perestroika movement is an anachronism. Its focus on methodological diversity is misplaced. Political science is not as a discipline complicitous with power. Now is the time to hone down on our disciplinary advances to address the fundamental problems that face our society and the wider world. Our failures as a nation to address these problems are due in part to ignorance, inertia, and polarized sentiments, but not an entrenched elite defending antediluvian structures with the political science discipline taking comfort in the status quo. Perestroika’s attack on the disciplining of political science ignores the demands of the era-appropriate ethic of responsibility and a discipline less tied to the structures supporting oppression. And hopes to regenerate the spirit of the 1960s is equally an anachronism, as we no longer face resolute enemies hiding within unyielding structures of power.