Kim Quaile Hill (PS: Political Science and Politics, July 2004) seeks to debunk five “myths about the physical sciences” that “pose notable hurdles for appreciating the social sciences as legitimate scientific enterprise” (467). One of these myths is that “the physical sciences have always been highly successful in explaining their subject matter.” Hill complains that political science students are “ignorant of the history of science” and therefore they fail to “appreciate the differences between young and mature scientific disciplines…. If students can appreciate that all sciences were once youthful—as political science still is today—they will have a useful perspective by which to understand why and how the knowledge base of our discipline is limited” (469).

Is political science qua science as young as Hill suggests? Perhaps political scientists, too, could benefit from remedial education in the history of science, especially that of their own discipline. Consider the following quotations:

• “Hitherto, the method of the sciences of observation has not been introduced into political questions; every man has imported his point of view, method of reasoning and judging, and hence there is not yet any precision in the answers, or universality in the results. The time has come when this infancy of the science should cease” (Henry Saint Simon, early nineteenth century, quoted in Thiele 1997, 9).
• “The backward state of the moral sciences can only be remedied by applying to them the methods of the physical sciences” (John Stewart Mill, quoted in Thiele 1997, 9).
• “Natural Science will in time subsume the science of man just as the science of man will subsume natural science; there will be one science” (Karl Marx, quoted in Flyvbjerg 2001, 26; emphasis in original).
• “The Physiology of Politics” (Title of A. Lawrence Lowell's 1910 presidential address to the APSA, in which he urged political scientists to apply the scientific procedures used in the study of human organs to the analysis of political organs).
• It is “fundamental” that “social science and natural science come together in a common effort to unite their forces in the greatest task that humanity has yet faced: the intelligent understanding and control of human behavior” (Charles Merriam's presidential address to the APSA, 1926).
• “It is to the natural science that we may most profitably turn … for suggestions as to the reconstruction of our postulates and methods” (William B. Munro's presidential address to the APSA, 1928).

Hill's claim that “ours is a young scientific discipline” (471)—made two centuries after Saint Simon lamented the “infancy of the science” of politics—confirms Charles Taylor's (1977, 106) observation that the social sciences are “constantly said to be in their ‘infancy.’” There may be many reasons why, as Hill concedes, the “knowledge base of our discipline is limited” (469), but tender age and a lack of effort to emulate the physical sciences are not among them.