The title of Henrik Enroth’s excellent book would come closer to its thesis and themes if it were The History of Anglo-American Political Science, Mostly, and the Should-Have-More-Consciously-Been- and Should-Still-Be Problem of Social Order. That’s too long and clumsy for a book that is anything but long or clumsy—and even then it leaves out its probing attention to sociology, historiography, and the future of political science. But it gestures to what is on offer in this relatively short but hugely ambitious book.

Enroth narrates a select history of twentieth-century political scientists (and fellow travelers) mainly in the United States and England, whose concepts and theories—pluralism, process, community, conflict, interest groups, power, system, and the return of the state—were crafted in the wake of and in response to “the problem of social order” in diverse and divided societies. It turns out that this problem (paraphrasable as “what holds society together?”) is “the unacknowledged debt of modern political science to social theory” (p. ix). For sociologists, however, “the problem” was the “front door” through which their discipline strolled, but “the problem came to political science through the back door” (p. 9), “unbeknownst to itself” (p. 1), “conspicuous by its absence” (p. 5) and submerged as an unacknowledged “presupposition” (p. 106). It has remained in this nearly comatose condition for more than a century, “buried—alive, or undead—in our concepts and theories of political life, where it has continued to haunt the discipline” (p. 164). Although it should have been more consciously addressed all along, it must now at last be disinterred and given a new lease on life as a self-conscious “object” of political inquiry or, perhaps, dissolved as a problem altogether (pp. 106, 171), for the living future of the discipline or its successor.

In this telling, the problem of social order clearly had—and still has—enormous power (even from the grave)—in itself and as a narrative framework. Instead of the discipline (like history) doing one damn thing after another, it was trying to do one grand thing in different ways, namely, solve the problem of social order—unconsciously and unsuccessfully, time and time again. Thus does Enroth tell his engrossing tale, economically executed in compelling prose, with flashes of wit and insight throughout.

Although there is a prefatory glance back at “the State” in the earlier political science of Francis Lieber and John W. Burgess, and although the ensuing episodes are mainly about American developments, the book takes off in Chapter 2 (in a great move) with Harold Laski, especially his Authority in the Modern State (1919). Laski is joined by other English pluralists—John Neville Figgis, Frederic Maitland, and G. D. H. Cole—who collectively stripped the state of its sovereign majesty and put it in its place as just one group amongst others. The state was not the solution to the problem of social order, as imagined by Lieber and Burgess. There were only groups, plural, that were somehow inexplicably to hold society together. The anarchistic implications for allegiance and authority—argued strenuously by American critics, such as Ellen Deborah Ellis and William Yandell Elliott—eventually pressed the pluralists into inconsistency when they conceded that, in the end, the state was more than a mere group. It was, in Laski’s later words, “‘the keystone of the social arch’” (p. 40).

Something of a pattern is established in the chapter on Laski and pluralism. Per chapter, there is, more or less, a major figure or two, their major book or two, carefully quoted many times to good effect, drawing upon supporting figures, as well as critics, so as to perform in effect an immanent critique, showing how the major figure or figures in question failed to solve the problem of social order in their own terms. As goes for Laski, so it goes for Arthur Bentley, George E. G. Catlin, Robert M. MacIver, John Dewey (the philosopher!), Mary Parker Follett (for whom “the pluralist check bounced at the community bank” [p. 81]), the consensus-interest-group theorists especially E. Pendleton Herring, V. O. Key, and David Truman (whose collective work Enroth is tempted to interpret “as status quo ideology scantily clad as empirical political science” [p. 97]), David Easton (something of a hero of the story), Floyd Hunter, C. Wright Mills, Robert A. Dahl, Nelson Polsby, Peter Bachrach, Kate Millett, Theda Skocpol, and Carole Pateman, among others. Sidelong glances are given to Charles E. Merriam, as well as Harold D. Lasswell (who might have deserved more notice, given his explicit “problem of world unity” and his policy proposals for “world order” in World Politics and Personal Insecurity [1935] and The Garrison State [1941]). Amidst his telling, Enroth also generously acknowledges the work of other historians of political science, in particular and deservedly, John G. Gunnell and Jens Bartelson.

Readers will choose for themselves, but for me, besides Laski’s, Chapters 3 and 6 on Bentley and Easton, respectively, are especially insightful (as towering figures in any interpretation of what went down in the history of political science). Bentley endured half a century of silence, his work on process entirely forgotten until David Truman “resuscitated and domesticated” him as an alleged founder of behavioralism (p. 59). What is this, Enroth remarks, but “carefully calculated exercises in self-justification, through the retroactive construction of a canon of behavioral research” (p. 46). Instead, Enroth emphasizes a more radical and weirder Bentley, given “the ontologically vertiginous implications” of his insistence on process upon process, as well as his wild polemics designed to “level a forest of human error” (pp. 45, 56). Before the “scientificator” Catlin is caught in the chapter “peeking over the fence into the neighboring discipline of economics” to find a social science of stronger stuff (p. 63), Bentley’s “processual superabundance” invites a lesson and receives an assessment from Enroth:

This is nothing less than the transvaluation of the value of Bentley in the history of political science.

Easton gets credit, in Enroth’s estimation, for offering “the most explicit effort to thematize and theorize the problem of social order that the discipline has seen” (p. 107). Alongside his great conceptual innovation—namely, politics as the authoritative allocation of values—Easton offered political scientists “an empirical political system out there in the world and a theoretical system in here in the discipline” (p. 118f). However, the tensions and inconsistencies in the meanings of “system” made Easton’s particular solution to the problem of social order most problematic. The conceptual apparatus of the theoretical system overwhelmed the facticity of the empirical system that it was intended to explain. The construct of a system lifted off actual behavior, as it were, into its own abstract realm, taking on a life of its own. It made empirical reality in effect a product of its own abstraction. “With this move, the concrete political system did not look so concrete after all.… it now seemed as if the access to and perhaps even the very existence of the thing itself were contingent on the concept of political system” (p. 117). Moreover, the abstraction evoked “a sense of déjà vu” “full circle back to the birth of modern political science.” “Once the systems theoretical palaver had blown over, it looked very much as if ‘political system’ was but another name for ‘state’” (p. 126).

Enroth notes Easton earlier when introducing his book’s scope and novelty, given everyone who has “failed to discuss the problem of social order” in the history of political science (p. 4). Easton is one of “two notable exceptions to this general rule … [the other being Bartelson], neither of which explicitly identifies the problem as such” (p. 4, emphasis added). Overlooking the minor matter that Easton is credited in Chapter 6 for being “the most explicit” about this, as quoted in the preceding text, it is worth wondering how explicit a problem must be to identify it, assess solutions, and trace its history. My wonder is informed by Karl Popper’s view of problem solving in science where “stating one’s problem clearly” is prerequisite to theorizing or proposing solutions. In particular, he prescribes in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959): “a variant of the (at present unfashionable) historical method. It consists, simply, in trying to find out what other people have thought and said about the problem in hand: why they had to face it: how they formulated it: how they tried to solve it.”

My wonder is also informed by Quentin Skinner’s view in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) that “the clearest sign that a society has entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is … that a new vocabulary comes to be generated, in terms of which the concept is then articulated and discussed.” What’s good for a concept is good for a problem.

Alas, none of the figures in the book, it appears, explicitly referred to “social order” (unlike, say, “democracy”) as the or their problem, though it conceivably lies behind any problem (including democracy) that they explicitly identified as their own. Indeed, no one quoted even seems to have used the phrase “social order” except once by MacIver (p. 74) who also used it in the unmentioned The Modern State (1926). While I think these issues deserve further discussion—namely, what kind of problem is a heretofore unacknowledged problem and how does the problem of social order compare with, say, the problem of democracy in political science (cf. p. 8)—it does not detract from the importance of the book or the power of its narrative framework.

Political Science and the Problem of Social Order is an important, welcome addition to the still-growing literature on the history of political science and should soon find itself at the center of discussions about the discipline, its problems, and its competing or complementary histories.