John Gunnell laments the ignorance of our own past in political science and is determined to get us to understand the richness of earlier generations of political scientists and theorists who focused on the American incarnation of democracy. The key task of this book is to examine the discipline's understanding of democracy, with a focus on the conversations surrounding conceptions of the state, liberalism, and, especially, pluralism. On this, Gunnell offers a comprehensive and enlightening history of some of the central defining discourses of political science and political theory, interwoven with discussions of how this history relates to the development of political science as a discipline.

The author starts with the conception of “the people” in the founding of the United States, in particular, the conceptions found in interpretations of The Federalist. In examining this period, he is less concerned with whether or not the United States was democratic than with whether it was perceived as such by commentators. This is tied to the development of the mission of American political science at the time, which, he argues, was less critical and analytical and more educational: “Its self-consciously defined vocation was to provide an image of the polity and to justify that image” (p. 55). This focus was criticized early on from within the discipline, and Gunnell obviously wants us to note the similarity of early and contemporary complaints. Walter Lippman bluntly observed in 1913 that “works on politics by American university professors are useless” (p. 113) as they had lost contact with the reality of political practice. Graham Wallace called for a “change in the conditions of political science” that would produce some real “political invention” (p. 114).

Gunnell, however, passes up the opportunity to focus on these long-lived critiques of the distance between the profession and its subject. Instead, he offers a thorough overview of the evolution of pluralist theory in the teens and twenties, with a focus on original material rarely seen. He explores a different tension in the discipline, between the growing interest in pluralism—from studies of groups to organic theories of the state—and the mainstream of political science in its emergence. As pluralist thought moved political theory away from “the state” and began to encompass sociology, psychology, and economics, it seemed to undermine the distinctive disciplines in the academy. He claims that the identity of political science was threatened; this helps explain why pluralism was, and still is, attacked by those uncomfortable with the move away from a focus on the state and on to the myriad groups within society.

Gunnell explores the move from a focus on pluralism to the prominence of liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s. This is not so much a discussion of the decline of pluralism as a discourse within political science as methodical coverage of the rise and evolution of the liberal discourse in this period. He describes where the discipline's central concern with liberal theory and institutions began before World War II, and offers a good discussion of the origins of the struggle around the conceptions of liberalism, totalitarianism, and conservatism in the years before and after the war. There is a very interesting, but unanswered, question here: Why did most pluralist theories disappear “from the consciousness, or at least the literature, of mid-century political science?” (p. 181). Pluralism as a discourse, of course, reappears in a new form after the war, and Gunnell notes the odd lack of acknowledgment of the earlier pluralists in the postwar generations.

The strength of this book is in the comprehensive history of the pluralist discourse in the discipline—up until the recent past. Unfortunately, Gunnell eschews a substantive discussion of the contemporary pluralist literature, covering the last 20 years in just seven pages of the final chapter—listing no fewer than 25 authors in a single footnote (n. 69, pp. 246–47). There are crucial differences among these authors, though Gunnell seems to assume a singularity of vision that simply does not exist. For example, he argues that the new pluralism devolves authority and democratic identity to small groups in response to the classic democratic problem of equality in decision making (p. 251). This is simply not true, as many contemporary pluralists named (a few of whom might object to the title) focus on relations between groups and the state (John Dryzek, Will Kymlicka, and Iris M. Young, to name three from Gunnell's list). The same attention to the contemporary literature as Gunnell showed the prewar generation would have illuminated some imaginative new responses to the central issues raised in earlier generations—conceptions of the state, the people, the government, group identity, and the relationships among them.

Gunnell offers some explanations for the resurrection of pluralist discourse—including John Rawls's interest, the collapse of the Cold War, and the rise of postmodern, poststructuralist, and multicultural theories. But his final explanation for this recurrence is the most intriguing: “the grip of the discursive heritage of political science” (p. 249). This is a fascinating claim and one of the key arguments in the book—that pluralism is how political science, over the entire term of its efforts, has imagined the American polity. Even though the discipline is oblivious to the literature and figures of the past, Gunnell argues, we are trapped in a discourse of our own making.

Imagining the American Polity concludes with a plea for the discipline to imagine “a fundamentally different way to think about the democratic concept” (p. 252). But the author does not suggest any strategies for extending the debate within the discipline or, more importantly, exploring other democratic discourses in civil society or bringing the internal debate to bear more on political practice. He defines his task as a third-order examination of second-order reflections and articulations on first-order democratic practice. Again, this is admirable intellectual and disciplinary history, but as it remains inwardly focused, it gives us no guidance for crossing or breaking down that boundary between first-order politics and second-order reflection. Political science as a discipline may be rich in history and discourse on conceptions of the state and pluralism, but a current critique of the discipline, from both within and without, stems from its lack of engagement with political movements and processes. Political science is already too internally focused, and while Gunnell sheds much light on the discourses that we have constructed, we will need more than just that light to break out of our shell. We will need a bit more imagination.