Jessica Blatt's groundbreaking book explores the leading thinkers who shaped the foundation of the political science discipline. It provides a direct challenge to “political science exceptionalism”—the belief that White supremacy and racism were absent from the discipline's early development. According to Blatt, a “racialist” metanarrative pervaded political science's approach to the study of political institutions and political behavior, both domestically and internationally.
Political science emerged during an era of social, political, and economic upheavals: the collapse of Reconstruction, civil service reform, the Gilded Age and industrialization, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Grappling with these transformations and modernizing political institutions and public bureaucracies were important concerns to social scientists.
John Burgess, a seminal figure in the founding generation of political science, influenced its early development. As outlined in chapters one and two, he believed that racial hierarchy or a “Teutonic” lineage was central to American democracy. He envisioned that a strong executive, conservative judiciary, civil service reform, and racially unified state—that is, a governmental process wedded to White supremacy—would circumscribe the congressional advocates of Reconstruction, racial equality, and racial assimilation. He also opposed internationalism due to fears that it would invite non-European immigrants/non-Aryans to the United States.
Woodrow Wilson, the nation's twenty-eighth president, himself a political scientist, takes center stage in chapter two. Born before the Civil War, he authored the seminal book Congressional Government in 1885. Like Burgess, Wilson believed that a strong presidency was essential to “protecting tradition and safeguarding (whites’) liberty” (p. 45) against immigrants and a pro-Reconstruction (pro-Black) Congress.
Blatt's assessment reveals that the early scholars of political science used value-neutral and good government arguments to mask their racial chauvinisms. Civil service reform and the push for executive over legislative power were linked to the restructuring of political institutions that reinforced the racial superiority of Whites. After the Spanish-American War, these early thinkers even “paired a Jim Crow theory of race relations with an internationalism” (p. 54) that used statecraft to promote US imperialism.
Yet, unlike his predecessors who rejected internationalism, Wilson believed that pro-Western, elite technocrats—a “professional, depoliticized apparatus” (p. 70)—could discipline non-Western nation-states. Public administration, which became a specialization area in the discipline of political science, could better manage colonized and formerly colonized people. The administrative state allowed neocolonialism and expansionism to be rationalized at a time when the United States seized the territories of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii.
Chapter four looks at the contributions of the Journal of Race Development (JRD, later renamed the Journal of International Relations and then Foreign Affairs) and the growth of international affairs. JRD rejected European-style colonialism and Burgess-style racism. Instead, it advocated for the internationalization of politics and an engagement between the West and non-European countries.
Yet Blatt argues that JRD's approach also promoted racialism, although a benign version of it compared to the early generation of scholars. This entailed grappling with the adaptability of Whites in non-European and hot climate countries and examining the evolutionary outcomes produced by international affairs. The latter investigations focused on whether Whites were vulnerable to acquiring the cultural traits and characteristics of non-Europeans or “inferior” races in international contexts. Though JRD provided a more sympathetic reading of racial and ethnic differences than earlier scholars, it nonetheless interpreted non-Whites as subordinate and inferior.
The prevalence of racism in the early years of political science, and social sciences in general, is not surprising. What is problematic is that the discipline's liberal-progressive wings tolerated this racialist thinking. The American Political Science Association (APSA), founded in 1903, underscored the ideological fluidity of political science, and was composed of both political scientists who promoted the Burgess-Wilson tendencies and those who articulated a liberalism that embraced racial and ethnic diversity.
The University of Chicago School of Political Science, led by Charles Merriam and his progeny, augmented the APSA and the expansion of political science. They were committed to the “science” of politics or the use of such empirical research as survey analytical tools. The Chicago School of Political Science further championed pluralist theory's belief that political power and influence are broadly distributed among a variety of interests, including racial and ethnic groups. Pluralism was a marked departure from the racial conservatism of the previous generation of political scientists.
Despite the emergence of pluralist theory, Blatt argues that the Chicago School retreated from the advancement of racial democracy. Chapters five and six describe how Merriam and others established a détente with racial conservatives, particularly psychometricians who sought to empirically prove that the human intelligence of Blacks and other non-Whites was inferior to Whites. Robert Yerkes, chair of the National Research Council (NRC) committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration at the time, was a key figure in this academic enterprise. He popularized the Army intelligence tests that ranked the human intelligence of different racial and ethnic groups, with Whites receiving the highest scores.
Merriam and other political scientists were critical of Yerkes, yet they tolerated the racialist underpinnings of the intelligence tests. Yerkes's spheres of influence in the NRC gave him control of research dollars that supported scientific studies of social and political behavior across disciplines. The leading political scientists lobbied for these funds and, in doing so, abided the racialist thinking of this period.
Despite the book's strengths, it understates the valid concerns about governance that were both independent and intersected with race and White supremacy. Disputes over legislative versus executive supremacy preceded Reconstruction and extend into the twenty-first century. For example, debates over a national debt, war-making powers, and the federal appointment process exposed the schisms between legislative-centered and executive-centered advocates in Congress and academic institutions. Racial conservatives stood on all sides of these arguments. Likewise, the expansion of the administrative state reflected divisions within the ranks of pro-Reconstruction lawmakers. These disputes were shaped by race and White supremacy, but they also raised valid concerns about how to model political institutions and bureaucracies. Giving more attention to this delicate balance could have enriched the book.
Even still, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the merger between science and politics. It makes a convincing argument that racialism and its various manifestations (White supremacy, colonialism/neocolonialism, imperialism, evolution, and racial psychometrics) have been instrumental to shaping political science. The book further refutes the notion that political science—unlike the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology—stood outside of the racialist thinking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To understand political science thus means centering racism as foundational to the discipline.
