Looking Backward: 2015–2000

By now, one might very well not only ask exactly what “perestroika” was but what happened to it. A considerable literature has been devoted to this subject, and my concern is not to recapitulate this episode in detail but rather to capture its basic character and to put it in perspective by locating it within the history of American political science as well as in the context of social inquiry as a whole.

Although there are many ways to describe and explain this disciplinary protest, it is best understood as one of the perennial identity crises that have marked the evolution of political science. Such crises are, however, endemic to the social sciences because of the relational character of these fields, that is, the fact that no matter how social science may theoretically construe its subject matter, that subject matter is discursively pre-constituted and autonomous. The consequence is that social science must be concerned with reflecting on its identity and often reforming that identity in the course of confronting its practical as well as epistemic relationship to its object of inquiry. The practical dimension of the relationship has been somewhat accentuated in the case of political science, because while fields such as sociology, economics, and anthropology gained a degree of conceptual distance by conceiving of their subject matter in categorical or generic terms such as society, the economy, and culture, the term “politics” referred to a more specific and distinct practice. Although there was sometimes an attempt to create a sense of unity with politics, as in the case of Woodrow Wilson’s designation of the department at Princeton, there was also a concern with establishing an insulated academic space for asserting the scientific authority to speak truth to power.

Despite the particular circumstances in which perestroika arose and notwithstanding the changes in the discipline and profession that might reasonably be attributed to it, it was basically a reverberation of longstanding problems about the relationship between political science and politics and about the tensions between the search, on the one hand, for intellectual unity and, on the other hand, the commitments to both disciplinary and political pluralism. These problems had been present from the inception of the field, but they were most immediately the legacy of the 1960s. They were, however, somewhat obscured by the emphasis on methodological and professional diversity and by the persistent ambiguities in claims about how to make the field more politically relevant. Consequently, while perestroika served to provoke greater mindfulness about these issues, it did not succeed in forcing a direct confrontation.

A person unfamiliar with the discipline of political science might be inclined to ask why this turn-of-the-century bottom-up professional protest was labeled “perestroika,” when its namesake referred to a top-down restructuring of the Soviet political and economic order. In Russia, Perestroika, along with Glasnost, involved efforts directed toward increased pluralization, democratization, and transparency, but whatever the social tensions that may have precipitated these policies, they were initiated in the service of structural system maintenance. The “rebellion” in political science originated as a demand from aspiring and dissatisfied young professionals for greater tolerance of methodological diversity in the face of what was claimed to be the growing dominance of the application of quantitative techniques in approaches such as rational choice analysis as well as for greater political significance in substantive research. The methodological bias attributed to the discipline was often understood as associated with elitism in the organization and functioning of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and its publications, which was manifest throughout the field in typical departmental structures and hiring practices. Whether the anonymous “Mr. Perestroika,” whose initial e-mail in 2000 sparked the quickly growing social media protest, was motivated by career anxiety, as some have suggested, or by broader and deeper intellectual and political concerns, the discussion that followed soon morphed into the resurrection of long-standing arguments about the nature of political inquiry and about the relationship between political science and politics. Perestroika was, however, distinctly a call for reform rather than a revolutionary challenge to the avowed principles of the discipline and profession, which were, on the whole, relatively quick to acknowledge the criticisms and to attempt to respond to the demands for diversity and relevance.

Although a number of prominent political scientists rose to defend what they claimed had been the recent progress in attaining a unified scientific study of politics, other senior members of the profession almost immediately stepped forward to proclaim their sympathy with the motives and motifs associated with the protest. And others emerged from the shadows to announce that, like a variation on the revelation of Monsieur Perrichon, they realized that they had been speaking “perestroikan” all along. Some of those who became identified with the protest were, despite sometimes exaggerated claims to personal heterodoxy, very much part of the political science establishment, and within a relatively short time, some of the leaders on both sides of the debate had joined one another at an annual meeting of the APSA and, in the typical liberal pluralist fashion of the field, declared, after acknowledging their differences, that, overall, they had similar basic goals and that there was, after all, unity in difference. Such images of conflict and reconciliation had been a recurring event in the history of political science, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was difficult to discern any such unity, despite the claim of the editors of the 2002 edition of Political Science: The State of the Discipline that there was an overall sense of identity attaching to the field. By 2005, what may reasonably be designated as the “real” perestroika and glastnost in American political science had begun, and as in the aftermath of 1960s, various reforms were designed and deployed to liberalize and restructure the organization, broaden the image of political inquiry, and speak more directly about the practices of politics. Unlike the fate of the Soviet Union, however, these policies succeeded in maintaining the basic professional and disciplinary system, and any worries about revolution, either intellectual or professional, soon faded away. At the end of the first decade, it was still not easy to specify what trends in the discipline were most significant, as the field looked once again more and more as if it were a holding company for a number of diverse enterprises, and, to appropriate the words of Rogers Smith, “still blowing in the wind” was the search for the “democratic science of politics” that had given birth to the field and that continued to inform its history.

The extent to which important changes in the practices of political science have been effected in the aftermath of perestroika is certainly open to debate, but it is important to recognize that the long-standing concern about practical engagement, and how to achieve this through internal methodological and professional reform, never focused on the extent to which some individual or group might undertake politically significant research or how, either as public intellectuals or producers and purveyors of knowledge, they might participate in or influence politics. The invocation of mantras such as problem-based research, were far from adequate. Some certainly believed that such particular initiatives might trickle upward, but the question was always, as in the case of the political concerns that inspired the formation of the APSA in 1903 and the transition from discipline to profession, that of how the discipline as a whole could gain practical purchase. The search for unity had never been simply to win ascendancy for a certain methodological persuasion but rather to vouchsafe the cognitive authority of the discipline, which, particularly with the distance between academic and political discourse in American society, was the only kind of authority that it could reasonably claim.

The fact and value of disciplinary pluralism has not only tended to be subversive of the congenital practical concerns of political science but also an unsatisfactory response to methodological tensions. If, by 2000, there was indeed an incipient intra-disciplinary imperialism, as charged once again as it had been in the 1960s, and even a threat to democratic values implicit in the use of quantitative methods, making more room for varieties of what has been vaguely labeled as qualitative research and interpretive approaches was not a solution to the underlying issues. As during the behavioral era, the attempt to present positivism and interpretism, or explanation and understanding, as complementary approaches only deferred a confrontation not only with the underlying practical problem but with theoretical issues revolving around the nature of political phenomena and entailed epistemological imperatives. It is somewhat ironic that although perestroika may have eventually contributed to some serious discussion about the nature of interpretive inquiry, the latter had from the beginning been vaguely specified, and it became more a slogan than the designation of a distinct methodological or theoretical argument. Such arguments were repressed by the enthusiasm for the ethic of pluralism that is so deeply embedded in the field as both a democratic theory and principal of disciplinary organization. It is, however, difficult to resist the logic and value of pluralism. This is not only because it appeared to meet the basic demands of those who initiated the protest but because it served the interests of the APSA in increasing membership and maintaining the hegemony of the organization. Despite all the threats from dissidents during the behavioral and post-behavioral years, even political theorists have not been willing to relinquish the professional benefits of the APSA and pursue the separate intellectual path that they so often continue to profess.

One of the most striking characteristics of the controversy about perestroika was the amnesia that was evident in much of the discussion with respect to the history of the field and particularly the previous generation. For many who had lived through the controversies of the 1960s, it seemed as if it were déjà vu all over again. The perestroika controversy evoked the image of the earlier conflict between defenders of the behavioral movement and critics such as those associated with the Caucus for a New Political Science, and perestroika was, in fact, largely another irruption of the issues that had defined what is often referred to as the “post-behavioral” era. The response of the APSA to perestroika was not unlike the embrace of methodological difference and the return to the idea of political science as a policy science that followed David Easton’s 1969 announcement of a “new revolution” in political science. What was so prominent in the 1960s, but, however, largely missing in the case of perestroika, were a distinct and focused ideological response to what was happening in American politics; a significant challenge to the theory of democracy that was embedded in the dominant practices of political science; a direct engagement with the issue of the relationship between political science and politics; a coherent and fundamental philosophical challenge to the conception of science that characterized the field; and an alternative account of social scientific inquiry. Although these issues were all intimated in the conversation about perestroika, they were not clearly articulated and confronted, and this was in part because they were sublimated in discussions about methodological pluralism and professional diversity.

The differences between these debates, separated by nearly half a century, can be attributed in part to the fact that some of the intellectual resources that might have been available to the perestroikan protest had been drained off during the last quarter of the twentieth century as political theorists increasingly, intellectually and institutionally, turned away from an engagement with the discipline and created a separate academic enclave, which appropriated, and to which the discipline was willing to bequeath, normative and philosophical concerns in order to retain the subfield as an element of the profession. And, in somewhat similar fashion, the Caucus was incorporated, like the Furies in the Oresteia, as a Section of the APSA. Issues relating to matters such as democratic theory, the philosophy of social science, and the relationship between theory and practice tended to disappear from the literature of mainstream political science. In addition, an increased emphasis, beginning with early graduate education, on professionalism coupled with continuing trends toward greater subfield specialization and accompanying differentiation, inhibited the kind of pointed conflict that characterized the behavioral era. Even though many of those who embraced perestroika did not seem aware of it, the protest reflected the failure of what had been the promise of post-behavioralism, which was a promise of greater organizational and methodological pluralism as well as increased political relevance, but even this promise masked the more fundamental issues. The greatest problem with perestroika was that it (if there was an “it”), or with many of those who identified with or participated in the protest, could not see beyond the limits of that residual promise. Therefore, it is important to recover the genealogy of that promise and a family tree with which many younger scholars were, if at all, only vaguely acquainted.

The Presence of the Past

The behavioral movement was actually less a revolution than a reaffirmation and defense of a theory of democracy and a complementary pursuit of a scientific theory of politics. What most distinctly prompted this reformation, which had begun in the 1950s, was that it faced a growing, but unconsolidated, insurgency mounted by a variety of dissident political theorists and other political scientists. Although by the early 1960s the particular tenets of behavioralism still did not represent the attitude and practice of most rank and file students of politics, it had begun to achieve a position of orthodoxy in some major departments and in the organization of the APSA, and by the mid-1960s, it was both a clearly self-ascribed identity and a target of expanding criticism, which together had in many respects begun to define the discourse of political science.

Although the critics were philosophically and ideologically diverse, they coalesced around their mutual opposition to the basic values embedded in American political science such as liberalism, individualism, interest-group pluralism, scientism and unity of science, the logical disjunction between fact and value, and pragmatic relativism, which were all, in various respects and degrees, elements of what had become a general vision of historical progress in both politics and political inquiry. As this conflict grew, a division between “traditional” or “historical” and “scientific” or “empirical” theory began to emerge as representing the increasingly divisive condition of the field. Indigenous theorists such as Sheldon Wolin joined a variety of émigré scholars such as Leo Strauss and characterized behavioralism as not only reflecting and abetting the decadence of contemporary politics but as representing the declination of the very idea of “the political.” And a number of theorists, such as Wolin and Carole Pateman, resurrected a vision of participatory democracy as an alternative to pluralist liberalism.

By the mid-1960s, a decade after offering his own version of the “decline” of political theory as a turn away from empirical to historical studies, Easton, who had emerged in the early 1950s as a principal expounder of behavioralism and a recommitment to appropriating and deploying the methods of natural science, had presented a thorough rendition of a systems analysis of political life, which was becoming emblematic of the substance and style of behavioral theorizing. Although Easton, working self-consciously within the Chicago lineage, had never subscribed to pluralism as a normative democratic theory, by the 1930s that theory had gained ascendancy in much of American political science and had been further refined and codified in the work of individuals such as Robert Dahl. This pluralist/empirical theory of American democracy was in many respects, more than the issue of science, the underlying source of the conflict. If examined closely, the commitments to the concept of system and to democratic pluralism were less than fully conceptually compatible, but any dissonance was submerged in the enthusiasm for disciplinary unity. In his 1965 presidential address to the APSA, David Truman, who early on had contributed to reinvigorating the group theory of politics, cast the history of the field as having undergone a paradigmatic transformation from “non-theoretical empiricism” to a new “disciplinary consensus” based on the concept of the “political system.” The following year Gabriel Almond, who had abstracted a pluralist version of American politics as a model for identifying the existence of democracy or a “civic culture” in the study of comparative politics, emphasized again, in his 1966 presidential address, that the idea of the political system was the core of the kind of intellectual transformation that Thomas Kuhn had characterized as a revolutionary paradigm.

By the end of the 1960s, the shaky philosophical foundations of the image of science that political scientists had embraced for half a century had been shored up by the adoption of secondary and tertiary accounts of logical positivism. By this point, however, a thoroughgoing critique of this philosophy had begun to emerge in the work of philosophers of science such as Kuhn, and this dissenting literature, along with new work in the philosophy of social science, laid the foundations for another dimension of criticism of the behavioral program. But one of the most provocative challenges to behavioralism sprung from a growing sense that despite all the talk about science and the difference between normative and empirical analysis, behavioralism had become implicated in an apology for the status quo in American politics and that a distinct but concealed value bias was embedded in both the form and substance of its research.

For many of the founders of behavioralism, the search for the authority of pure science was, as it always had been, to serve the practical purpose of perfecting the implications of left-leaning liberalism. It was, however, now appearing to critics as underwriting Cold War ideology and as fostering neglect of the crises attending contemporary domestic politics. Applications of systems analysis often seemed to be a subtle valorization of the American constitutional structure, and quantitative studies of voting behavior often appeared as reflections of what Dahl had labeled the “American hybrid” that he claimed was rooted in the processes of interest-group politics bounded by an underlying value consensus. Individuals such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Robert Lane claimed that this model constituted something close to what Daniel Bell had described as the “end of ideology” and the post-historical “good society in operation.” Given the disturbances related to the civil rights movement, increasing urban chaos, student uprisings on college campuses, the Vietnam War, and the persistence of the Cold War, what purported to be scientific realism in political science seemed quite out of phase with the realities of politics. In addition to the critique of pluralism mounted by political theorists, progressive scholars such as V.O. Key, Grant McConnell, and Theodore Lowi raised questions not only about pathologies in the practices of pluralist politics but about the existence of theoretical flaws in the basic formulation. They argued that pluralism had become not only the reigning academic theory of democracy but an essential part of the American public philosophy, which, despite its ostensible claims to freedom and equality, concealed elements of the very elitism that it professed to oppose.

Many charged that it was not simply the discipline that had gone awry, however, but the profession as well and that elitism was evident in the structure of the APSA. By 1967, increasingly widely shared professional and disciplinary discontents had given rise to the Caucus, which focused attention not only on the conservatism in both the functioning of the APSA and the theory of pluralist liberalism but on what it claimed was, on one hand, the growing gap between political science and politics, and, on the other hand, various forms of collusion between the APSA and government agencies such as the CIA. The problems of political science involved commission as well as omission. Many really believed that the stage was set for a professional and disciplinary revolution. The fact that it did not happen, and why it did not happen, is a necessary aspect of identifying and understanding the character and fate of perestroika.

Although Easton was nominated as president of the APSA in 1967 and elected the following year, but in the characteristic internal bureaucratic manner without general member participation, he recognized the depth of the internal and external problems with which the discipline and profession were confronted. At the 1968 annual meeting, the organization had continued to hold the line against dissent, but in doing so it lost considerable support as the base of discontent broadened. In preparation for his year as president, Easton worked intensively to mediate between the APSA establishment and its critics, to counter elitism within the organization and to liberalize Association procedures, to identify and engage all identifiable groups and provide for their participation in the 1969 annual meeting, and to allay concerns about dubious partisan Association relations. This was in many ways an extraordinary accomplishment, but in the end it was yet another example of the limitations of pluralist politics, and it served more to defer than to solve some of the underlying problems. Not unlike the pluralization of the Democratic Party during the McGovern candidacy, the lack of unity, threatened to make it less organizationally as well as politically effective.

In his presidential address, Easton announced that a “post-behavioral revolution” was “underway,” and he presented a challenge to what he now, quite suddenly, claimed had become the “behavioral orthodoxy.” He noted that the “battle cries” of this emerging movement were “relevance and action,” which emanated from a broad “aggregate of people” and represented a distinct “intellectual tendency” springing from a “deep satisfaction with political research and teaching, especially of the kind that is striving to convert the study of politics into a more rigorous scientific discipline modeled on the methodology of the natural sciences.” He maintained that the path forward was not one of relinquishing the past devotion to “the discovery of demonstrable basic truths about politics” but, at least temporarily, of adopting a “credo of relevance.” This entailed putting “substance” above “technique” and recognizing that behavioralism had concealed an “ideology of social conservatism;” had lost touch with political reality; had failed to both study and construct values as well as remain conscious of the values that informed research; had not taken account of the responsibility of intellectuals for defining and defending social values; had become too complacent about interest-group politics, and had not engaged in the kind of “politicization” of the profession that was required in order to fulfill the proper social role of intellectuals. Although Easton still insisted that behavioralism had been scientifically successful in effecting a revolution in the discipline, it had favored “description” over “prescription” and assumed that it was necessary to accumulate knowledge before seeking a practical application. He argued that the enormity of contemporary international and domestic problems required reversing priorities and putting “whatever knowledge we have to immediate use” in order to “respond to the abnormal urgency of the present crises” and attend to the “problems of the day to obtain quick, short-run answers with the tools and generalizations currently available.” He claimed that, as the “great political theorists of the past” had made clear, it was morally incumbent on political inquiry to acknowledge the “responsibility for acting” and to begin once more to engage in “speculative theorizing” and to “construct new and often radically different conceptions of future possible kinds of relationships.” Although “basic research” should not be abandoned, the emphasis should be on “short-run” concerns and on a shift in research strategy. Just as the discipline required significant “restructuring” in order to restore relevance, it was necessary for the profession to recognize that it was “immoral” not to act on the basis of its knowledge. Ethical neutrality was no longer an option, and it was necessary to return to a more humanist and interdisciplinary perspective. He claimed that too often the profession had served the elite in society rather than the most disadvantaged, but the time had come to redress the balance and to create a social-scientific organization with an interdisciplinary perspective that would consolidate and bring to bear diverse areas of knowledge. He proposed the creation of a Federation of Social Scientists that would identify major issues, recommend solutions to problems, and “press them vigorously in the political sphere” where it would critically confront existing national policies.

It is sometimes forgotten just how radical Easton’s rhetoric appeared at the time. Perestroika could have easily appropriated his essay as a basis of its platform, and although his manifesto was strategically composed as a way of confronting the internal politics of the field, it expressed the remnants of a tradition that was deeply embedded in the history of the field. Although Easton’s address seemed to represent a somewhat abrupt change of heart, Wolin, in an article immediately following Easton’s address in the same issue of the American Political Science Review, presented what may have been heretofore the most scathing critique of the discipline and profession. But rather than calling for disciplinary reform, he invited political theorists to join ranks in a “vocation” that would stand in opposition to the scientific and political failure of mainstream political science. He attacked the vocation of the “methodist” that was represented in approaches such as system theory and the “techniques” of data-gathering and analysis which, despite claims to objectivity, constituted a rejection of authentic theorizing and which contained concealed ideological assumptions. Behavioralism, he maintained, reflected the most complacent aspects of what Kuhn referred to as “normal science,” and it transmitted that normalization to its account of politics. “Liberal pluralism” had allowed political science to stay on “good terms” with American politics and its inherently non-theoretical and ahistorical attitude. What the study of the “great tradition” of political theory provided was a repository of “wisdom” and “tacit political knowledge” that was the “antithesis of political science” and offered a source of political education as well as a basis for the kind of practical judgment that was needed to address the current social crises and the state of democratic politics. Wolin’s article was based on a 1968 paper presented at the Conference for the Study of Political Thought and was interpreted by some as a signal that the subfield of political theory might escape the confines of political science, but the ultimate professional timidity of most political theorists together with a new conciliatory attitude on the part of the political science establishment kept political theory on the reservation. Somewhat like the case of the Caucus, it found a section home in the Foundations of Political Theory. What belied both Easton’s vision of political science and Wolin’s image of the vocation of political theory was the reality of the lack of unity in each.

It might have seemed at this point that there was a basis for a rapproachment between political theory and political science, since both seemed intent on practical engagement and furthering the cause of democratic politics. By the early 1970s, the tone of disciplinary discourse reflected a diluted image of such a disposition as political scientists sought to reconstitute the idea of the field as a “policy-science” and political theorists embraced the work of individuals such as Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls as a reprieve from the near-death experience many had earlier attributed to normative theory. There is no doubt that there was a heightened self-consciousness about the relationship between the academy and politics as well as about the nature of political inquiry, but the polarized controversy that had characterized the 1960s began to wane, and what might have seemed on the verge of becoming a truly revolutionary epoch in political science failed to develop. As in the case of politics itself, the unity spawned by common opposition is not sustained in the aftermath of polarization. What emerged from this situation was basically a strengthened ethic of pluralism that allowed political science and political theory to remain professionally integrated but intellectually detached, and, with the demise of the academic cold war, both political science and political theory became increasingly internally pluralized. The “vocation” of political theory gave way, as Wolin would later lament, to variety of theoretical “vocations” that were driven more by professional concerns than political relevance, and political science increasingly projected an image of itself as a highly eclectic profession and discipline. Although the profession had been created to make the discipline more political, professional concerns, as in the case of perestroika, began to overwhelm political ones.

A sign of the times was that Karl Deutsch, who had been one of those most vocal in driving a wedge between political science and political theory as well as in pursuing the dominance of systems analysis, devoted his 1971 APSA presidential address to elaborating an ecumenical stance that not only welcomed all forms of what could be construed as theorizing but encouraged a bridge between “political theory” and “political action.” This spirit informed presidential addresses though the 1970s, but it was increasingly more an expression of unrequited hope than a description of the actual state of affairs. The distance between the profession and politics was increasing, and differentiation within the discipline made it more difficult even to imagine how connections could be conceived and on what basis they could be achieved. Perestroika can be understood in part as the residual aura of the bad conscience that haunted the aftermath of the 1960s. So much was promised but so little was delivered. The answer to this failure is not, however, to be found in situational logic but rather in the nature of the identity crises that have characterized the field of political science and in the pervasive attachment to pluralism, which for three-quarters of a century has informed the image of American democracy as well as the politics of political science.

Difference and Identity

One problem with both post-behavioralism as well as perestroika was the assumption that reforming the discipline would change not only its epistemic but practical relationship to politics and that methodological diversity was the key to such a transformation. In both cases, the focus was on methodological and professional diversity and on inclusion, and the criticisms of pluralist politics were forgotten. But a discipline without a clear sense of identity was not the solution any more than pluralist politics was the answer to democratic identity. One of the underlying causes of the identity problem in political science is that, somewhat unlike both sociology and economics, for example, political science—notwithstanding the idolatry of the classic canon of political thought—did not evolve and revolve around a distinct shared core of theoretical icons. For example, one would look in vain for a figure comparable to Max Weber or Emile Durkheim. But what political science did share with the other social sciences was the belief that there was an epistemic answer to the practical problem of the relationship between discipline and its subject matter. Whatever the similarities and differences between perestroika and former upheavals in political science, perestroika once again brought this issue to the fore. The issue was, however, somewhat clouded by the focus on methods and the claim that a scientific or quantitative approach to inquiry must be complemented by more humanistic and interpretive methods. This issue was further muddied by vague arguments about how the latter were in some way intrinsically more democratic and politically relevant.

While claims about “making political science matter,” such as that advanced by Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino, represent an important and successful effort of certain researchers to engage politics, it does not solve the problem of how to make the discipline and profession “matter” and of answering the questions of whose political science should matter and to whom it should matter. Their work is based on seeking a model in something such as Aristotle’s account of practical reason or Phronesis, but the more temporally and substantively apposite historical examples may be the nineteenth-century practices of moral philosophy and the social reform movements, which together gave rise to the modern social sciences. There was never a time, even during the behavioral era, in which there was not a deep concern about making the discipline matter. The problem that these normative practices ultimately faced, however, was not that they lacked what might be broadly characterized as a phonetic spirit but that they ultimately failed to be bearers of any conventional form of social authority and privilege. In the pursuit of such authority, whether they were conservatives or liberals, they invoked science as a surrogate for religion as a way of compensating for their increasingly marginalized status. For Francis Lieber, who can reasonably be construed as the nineteenth-century founder of what Bernard Crick referred to as the “American science of politics,” and figures such as sociologist William Graham Sumner, the answer was to claim the status of science in their pursuit of ideological goals. This was one of the principal reasons that the emerging social sciences both professionalized and gravitated toward a home in the academy. This search for the authority of science, however, paradoxically distanced the social sciences, physically and conceptually, from the very world that they wished to influence, and, at the same time, they became bound to the vagaries of transformations in the images of science to which they were beholden. If we probe and understand this historical background, we can in large measure understand the underlying source of the insecurities that have prompted the crises of identity that have given rise to the basic controversies and transformations that have defined the history of American political science and that continued to resonate in a protest such as perestroika. There is a fundamental paradox inherent in the very idea of a political science, but unless that paradox is clearly recognized, it cannot be confronted. Although this paradox may be particularly apparent and salient in the case of political science, it is ultimately rooted in the fundamental difference between natural and social science.

It would indeed be strange, and even silly, to argue that transformations in natural science are a consequence of changes in its subject matter, because natural science is the theoretical author of the “facts” that constitute its subject matter. The difference between natural science and social science is the difference between presentation and representation. The concept of representation entails the assumption of an original that is represented, no matter how and by what means it is represented. Social science is in the business of representation, but after natural science has presented a picture of some element of world, it makes little sense to ask about the separate identity of that element. Because of this relational character, the social sciences are marked both by their changing perceptions of their subject matter and by a need to consistently respond epistemically and practically to changes in that object of inquiry—or to confront problems that have arisen from a failure to recognize such changes. The case of political science is somewhat unique even among the social sciences. Although for all the social sciences, their relationship to their subject matter is not simply unidirectional, the study of politics has faced a special problem. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social sciences were not only insecure about both their authority and practical efficacy but faced retribution for meddling in social practices. The university provided some physical distance, while the language of social science offered theoretical distance, but they faced the paradox of wanting to gain proximity and influence but yet escape both the wrath of the natives and the danger of losing objectivity through co-optation. No matter how politics was construed and characterized by political scientists, it was the name of a distinct, specific, locatable, and concrete social practice about and within which people had strong opinions and which was capable of taking considerable umbrage not only regarding the fact that it was being studied but about how it was interpreted and represented. The dangers of studying politics were evident in the late nineteenth century, during the 1920s, and in the 1950s and 1960s when the focus on pure science and objectivity was reinforced and in part instigated by McCarthyism and responses to funding resources.

Although there was the danger that critical discussion and commentary might be inhibited, political science sometimes mustered sufficient courage to provide a touchstone for controversy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, it was evident that political science was not actually a very politically fearsome practice and that if political scientists were afraid of politics, it was more an acquired trait than a primary genetic propensity. The days when the political establishment was upset by folk singers and political scientists has receded, because they have been disempowered by being treated as irrelevant. For criticism to be effective, it must be taken seriously, and a discipline that seeks its identity in diversity is especially weakly positioned.

Much of the residual imagery regarding the relationship between political science and politics is the resonance of a distant past, and the history of American political science can be viewed from one perspective as a steadily increasing practical estrangement from politics. Although this is in part simply the fate of accentuated professionalism and the fact that there are few instances in which political scientists and political theorists have actually foregone academic rewards in favor of political engagement, it is also in part a consequence of the nature of the American academy and its historical relationship to American public. But the political theorists of the 1960s did see a problem with the ethic of pluralism, and that ethic continues to confound politics as well as the kind of discussions that characterized perestroika. Perestroika was at once a call for methodological and professional pluralism and for making political science matter, but there was a distinct tension between these demands. At least in the 1960s, there seemed to be two basic choices, as fanciful as either may have been—Easton’s Federation or Wolin’s vocation, but by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a discipline based on methodological pluralism was in a poor position even to imagine either, and the resurgence of the theory of democratic pluralism also exacerbated the problem.

By the late 1920s, it seemed that the reality of diversity in American society had undercut what many had begun to refer to as the “democratic dogma” or the belief that an organic American people stood behind both the Constitution and the government. This created a dilemma about the possibilities of fundamental change through public policy, and it seemed that the only possible answer was to find within the interplay of interest groups bounded by a liberal consensus the possibility of a relatively automatic society that political scientists could describe and valorize but not significantly enter except in a limited way as advisors to the umpires in government. This image of beneficent pluralism became the meaning of liberalism for a generation and continued in new renditions to inform behavioral political science through the 1960s when liberalism qua pluralism also became the prime target of a wide range of political theorists who resurrected images of democracy as grounded on a public realm and a participatory constituency. By the middle of the 1980s, pluralism had largely receded as the centerpiece of a theory of democracy in both political theory and mainstream political science, and the policy-turn in the discipline was fading away as a source of professional identity, even though the issue of how to make political science and political theory politically relevant persisted in surfacing. Political scientists had begun to be enthusiastic about the application of economic models of rational choice, but although this promised a new sense of disciplinary unity and identity, it had little to do with the basic issue of the relationship between political science and politics.

In the 1990s, there was a relatively sudden resuscitation of a theory of pluralist democracy. This was in many ways distinctly different from the pluralism that characterized the theory and ideology of behavioralism, but the similarities and continuities were greater than the proponents have been willing to recognize. The historical and intellectual sources of the new pluralism included the collapse of Communism; the growing awareness of multiculturalism; Rawls’s revision of liberalism to include a “reasonable pluralism” and an “overlapping consensus”; a pluralist turn in the work of Habermas; and the popularity of various aspects of post-modernism. Despite the loyal opposition of communitarian images of democracy and worries about a decline in “social capital,” that, as president of the APSA in 2002 Robert Putnam assumed to be essential to the public role of political science, it was difficult, by the end of the twentieth century, to find a critic of pluralism. In it new incarnation, it had once again become the hallmark of democracy, and it was inevitable that the enthusiasm for pluralism would begin to spill over into the profession of political science. This was certainly one of the factors that gave rise to perestroika, but it also foreshadowed the impotency of the movement.

There are few who have ever suggested that pluralism was not a central attribute of democracy, but it is not easily conceived as the basic principle of democratic governance. From its earliest American origins, political science has been devoted to determining the constitutive principle of democracy and assessing the extent to which American politics conforms to that principle, and disciplinary identity has been ultimately tied to conceptions of democratic identity. The ethic of political pluralism, even in its most recent forms, continues to manifest tensions with the ethic of democracy, but it raises particular difficulties for the relationship between political science and politics. Where and how, for example, does political science intervene if not in the interest of a general public? And how can it speak if it does not have a distinct voice? Some suggest that the task is for the knowledge class to lend expertise to the least advantaged, but whatever practical agenda political science might embrace, it raises the issue of elitism and substituting scientific judgment for democratic judgment. It is also difficult to conceive any form of political pluralism that escapes the pathologies involved in attempting to achieve democratic public policy, which were stressed by the critics in the 1960s. In many respects, the ethic of pluralism, both epistemic and political, was at the heart of perestroika, but this ethic continued to be riddled with problems that make it vulnerable to absorption in the persistent centrifugal forces of professionalism.