This eloquent volume, which originated as Columbia University's Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures in 1997–98, has a dual mission. The first is personal. It is a “critical homage” to the post–World War II scholars who were Ira Katznelson's teachers. Practicing their craft “in the midst of a moment stamped by the greatest shocks and stresses the Enlightenment tradition had ever faced,” these scholars produced a powerful revision of American Enlightenment liberalism that Katznelson believes could serve as a guidepost for today (p. 157). Confronting the “twentieth-century compound of total war, totalitarianism, and holocaust,” they would neither simply reaffirm the faith in reason and science as secular grounds of moral progress nor simply repudiate ideals of autonomy and freedom as “mere fantasy or, worse, the main source of radical evil” (pp. 33, 39). They “sought instead to renew and protect the Enlightenment's heritage by appropriating and transforming social science, history, and the study of public policy” so as to provide illumination in the face of desolation (p. xiii). Katznelson's principal aim is to show how the work of this group might make possible a subtle intervention into “today's fervent but thin controversies about social inquiry and the status of Enlightenment” (p. xv).

The second mission is professional. Katznelson calls for an intellectually richer, more expansive practice of political science, one unlike that which takes pride of place in the discipline's flagship journal. He offers a mordant description of reading the American Political Science Review, describing it as “an exercise in applied schizophrenia, the result of the stark disjuncture dividing description and analysis from judgment and normative purpose” (p. 161). Echoing the demands of the recent “Perestroika movement” (2000–2001), that broad coalition of political scholars who called the discipline to task for the hegemony of hard science methods in the study of politics, Katznelson calls for a more integrated and engaged practice of political study. He argues for combining the “deduction of politics from norms with its extrapolation from facts, affiliating engaged social criticism with disinterested social science to discover truth about how things work” (p. 3).

Are these two missions not at odds? Is not the period to which Katznelson lays claim as a personal legacy a founding moment for institutionalizing the very bifurcation that he takes it as his professional mission to override? Indeed not. The central provocation of this volume is his assertion that the postwar period gave birth to a lost intellectual tradition: the “political studies enlightenment” (p. 3). This intellectual project eludes the typical cartography that maps the discipline in terms of an empirical versus normative divide. It bound together such diverse thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polyani, and David Truman—scholars who would not typically be featured on a common syllabus, let alone be credited with a shared program. Yet Katznelson insists that they ought to be. He contends that their intellectual commitments are best grasped through the “prism” of Karl Mannheim's injunction: Replace “a thin behavioralism, concentrating on the externally perceivable and ‘content to attribute importance to what is measurable merely because it happens to be measurable,’ [with] a new and deeper set of systematic studies suspended between empiricism and ‘truth’” (p. 164).

Katznelson devotes the body of this volume to what he calls an “intellectual history of the political studies enlightenment” (p. 153). This is an effective, albeit disingenuous, rhetorical move insofar as he represents himself as documenting an overlooked postwar tradition. I believe that what he undertakes in this book is more creative and controversial: He invents the “political studies enlightenment” as a tradition that is to serve as both inspiration and legitimating ground for those contemporary scholars whose work does not conform easily to today's demarcations of subfield and methodology.

Given his desire to persuade his readers to see the political studies enlightenment as a single tradition, it is puzzling that he chooses to divide it into two “wings”—one “Europe-oriented” and the other “specializing in the United States”—and to develop his argument by devoting a chapter to each in turn (p. 112). The effect of this organization is both to reestablish the gap that he sets out to bridge and to suggest that the political studies enlightenment exists almost exclusively as an effect of Katznelson's interpretive lens. He offers no evidence that there was collaboration and contact across its two “wings” but rests his case almost exclusively on provocative rereadings of classic texts.

The author begins with the European wing, reading the work of Arendt and Polyani, specifically Origins of Totalitarianism and The Great Transformation, as exemplars of “historical social science” (p. 64). He emphasizes how the two “stand out for their risky, difficult, and compelling efforts to combine structural and moral periodizations” (p. 54). He also notes that by virtue of this combination, both texts, but especially Origins, are either wrongly overlooked by the “social and political sciences,” or read one-sidedly (p. 61). He chastises “empirically oriented political scientists” for being so put off by Arendt's “Heideggerian style” that they fail to appreciate that “Arendt in fact performed like a very good political scientist of comparative politics” (pp. 119, 120). Thus, they overlook how her project and practice can be linked to that of the American political science mainstream.

Katznelson's portrait of the United States–focused wing of the political studies enlightenment is the most unorthodox aspect of his argument. He rebuts commonplace accounts of this period—understood as a time when scholars turned away from the state to study the political process, when quantitative methods effected a sharp divide between normative and empirical analysis, and when empirical scholars institutionalized a complacency about United States institutions—by assigning the Columbia University Seminar on the State to the position that behavioralism typically holds as its defining intellectual force. This seminar was a locus for inquiry by a methodologically plural group of scholars who gathered not in a spirit of optimism but in anxiety regarding “the character and security of liberal states and their abilities to advance pluralism while coping with its perils” (p. 120). The state remained their central object of analysis, although they aimed to make its study “realistic and behavioral” by treating “rules and institutions,” rather than metaphysical ideals and singular interests, as the means for integrating a “diverse and fractious country” (p. 130). Katznelson identifies this concern, to study the modern state as “the cord by which the Enlightenment and desolation are tethered,” as a defining project of the political studies enlightenment, one that exemplifies its capacity to contend with the darker sides of progress (p. 120).

Desolation and Enlightenment is a provocative retelling of the history of twentieth-century political science. Contrary to the complacent portrait of the 1950s, he demonstrates that there was already at midcentury a revision of the Progressive Era optimism regarding science and the state that was initially so formative for the discipline's mainstream. In addition, he starts a new conversation about the history of the discipline by insisting that this revision was initiated not only by refugee scholars but also by the American political science mainstream. This is a reinterpretation of the postwar period of political science in America that is sure to be controversial. It promotes the postwar period, a time that most political theorists demonize as the origin of an apolitical turn to a hard science model of political study, as a resource for a more ecumenical, less balkanized version of the discipline.

This was, for me, the most inspiring thread of the book. How many of us who teach contemporary political thought would present Polanyi and Dahl as allies? How many of us who teach philosophy of social science would group them as methodological kin? Katznelson prompted me to ask these questions. He also prompted me to think about how I reproduce on my own course syllabi the very distinctions of subfield and methodology that movements like Perestroika have so productively challenged. As a contribution to that struggle, as well as to the more abstract debates about the meaning and place of Enlightenment ideals in contemporary political life, this book is timely and important.