Back in 1991, when presenting a paper at the University of Havana, I began provocatively by saying we lived in a post-Marxist world (only when I finished my presentation did my hosts return my passport—and then everyone in the audience laughed, but I could only chuckle nervously). In that august academic setting, I argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union had forced Cuba to reconsider what Marxism would look like going forward (both in theory and in practice). I noted that this meant that Marxists unavoidably had now become the objects of their own inquiries (having studied with Jack Gunnell, I was prone to such verbiage and the tendency to place debates about scholarly pursuits in a broader historical context). Post-perestroika in political science, this self-reflection is now also true for those who participated in this most recent effort to revitalize the discipline.

As a longstanding member of the Caucus for a New Political Science and the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association, I have continued to try to work through the issues Jack Gunnell first introduced to me in graduate school and which he so insightfully dissects in his essay. I took what he taught seriously. I was active in the perestroika movement to revitalize the discipline and to open up the dominant approaches to the study of politics to interrogation in order to create opportunities for political science research to be more politically efficacious. No doubt there have been failures along the way, and in fact much of what perestroikans sought (individually and collectively) has not transpired. Political science is nonetheless better for this latest installment of the ongoing struggle in “making political science matter.”

Many Perestroikans wanted political scientists to resist the complacency that comes with pursuing “knowledge as an end in itself” and emphasizing theory and method over substance. Instead, political scientists should be more interested in conducting “problem-driven” research that contributed to ongoing political struggle, recognizing that relevance should neither imply being a handmaiden to power nor diluting scholarship just to make it more accessible to ordinary people.

Gunnell’s grasp of political science’s history and its relationship (or lack thereof) to the political world it seeks to understand continues to inspire me with its mastery of the issue. His historical perspective helps understand how perestroika involved a reenactment of the challenges associated with prior efforts. Yet I would argue that his analysis shows that while the struggle may be Sisyphean, it is the right struggle nonetheless.

I do not know how many of my compatriots in the perestroika movement were ignorant of the extent to which we are replicating earlier efforts to make political science be more true to its founding. And while I at times may have forgotten or even never appreciated the full extent of our roles as replicants, it was hard for me to deny it given what I had studied in graduate school and with whom. The fact that we were risking been seen as people who failed to learn from history did not deter many of us who openly discussed this issue as we struggled to revitalize our chosen field of scholarly endeavor and reimagine it in ways that would enhance its political relevance. The prior failures to realize a more political political science did not undermine our efforts as much as remind us that we were involved in a venerable tradition that spoke to issues that went to the very heart of what political science was about.

The fact of the matter is that pushing for change is ineliminably iterative, more cyclical than linear, as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward famously argued. As the forces of resistance inevitably reassert themselves, we are pushed to re-engage the battle, sometimes to reclaim the very same terrain that had been gained and then lost.

I do think that Gunnell raises a number of critical points that must be kept in mind whenever working on this issue. Prominent among those expressed in his essay is the profound paradox that political science looks like a field where political authority was sought by way of wrapping itself in the mantle of science. Claiming objectivity and impartiality by way of scientific inquiry only meant that the discipline had to further remove itself from the political field to ensconce itself in the halls of the academy.

Yet I disagree that this is a problem unique to political science. In fact, I remember first learning in graduate school from Gunnell himself that Max Weber’s concern about the vocation of science in contrast to the vocation of politics produced a similar irony: academics generally needed to be impartial in order to achieve the needed political legitimacy that could help save politics from the foreboding image of a bureaucratized world with its “polar night of icy darkness.” The social sciences in toto have been grappling with this critical paradox from Weber on. A society left to fend for itself without opportunities for critical reflection would come to be dominated by those who claimed to only be carrying out orders. The case of political science is, however, paradigmatic in the way it heightens the paradox. How does being impartial about politics help one become politically efficacious? As we struggle with the risks of repeating past mistakes about making political science matter, we might need to think through this profound paradox in different ways that allow for better answers.

While perhaps pluralism is not the best answer especially for an individual political scientist, it may have been an effective legitimating agent for the discipline as a whole at various points in its history. An open field of study amenable to diverse perspectives and methods is less vulnerable to being dismissed as ideologically biased. It is, however, very much an open question whether this is either a credible or effective stance today in an era of extreme ideological polarization and resulting political gridlock. How can even the most relevant political science research make a dent in the political field if it is populated by people whose minds are already made up and are prepared to dismiss even the most scrupulously conducted empirical research as politically suspect because it does not fit a pre-conceived political agenda?

Yet just because the relationship of political science to politics may now be more fraught than ever, it may mean it is time to ever more urgently revisit this persistent anxiety about political science’s problematic relationship to politics. If we do not, we risk being complicit in the politics of denial and the disrespect for legitimate scientific inquiry that has overtaken the existing political system in recent years, on any number of issues ranging from global warming to voter fraud. While political science research might not be able to prove global warming is real, it can help show how vested interests systematically seek to discredit legitimate scientific research on the topic. And political science research is already effectively showing the same about the fraud of voter fraud as an issue, as well as its deleterious effects on U.S. elections.

In an age of increasing inequality, where higher and higher concentrations of wealth among an elite few are used to dominate the political system, political science research that speaks truths to these issues of power is needed now at least as much as before. Working to ensure that political science gets to play its part in the broader field of political struggle is still an effort well worth repeating.