Race and the Making of American Political Science is an interesting and important book about the origins of political science as an academic discipline in the United States. Drawing on archival records and century-old journal issues and conference proceedings, Jessica Blatt reveals the ways in which the men—and they were all men—who birthed and cultivated the discipline of political science in American universities during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were driven by racial concerns that permeated their research and policy interventions.

Blatt situates the late nineteenth-century founding of American political science in the context of a country still reeling from Civil War and Reconstruction. For John William Burgess, the man responsible for bringing political science to universities in the United States and training the first native generation of American political scientists, the upheaval he faced as a young unionist Tennessean forced to flee home during the war prompted him to find his scholarly calling. But Burgess was not alone; as Blatt documents in Chapters 1 and 2, other early political scientists with less dramatic wartime experiences were similarly alarmed by what they saw as Radical Republicans’ reckless attempt to undermine “basic facts of political life” (p. 39). Viewed from this standpoint, racism was not merely incidental to the work produced during the first generation of American political science, but essential to its purpose: a science of the state that located sovereignty within racially homogenous national communities diagnosed the Reconstruction Era as fundamentally pathological and promised solutions to emerging policy concerns, such as immigration, that would avoid the perceived errors of the past.

Nor was this race-centered orientation limited to the study of the political system of the United States; rather, Blatt demonstrates in Chapters 3 and 4 that the progenitors of today's area studies, comparative politics, and international relations subfields were grounded in similar assumptions and theories. The turn of the twentieth century was the apex of American imperialism, and, much as early political scientists were interested in shaping domestic politics and policy in the United States, they sought to influence its emerging role as a colonial power. As Blatt describes it, the early-twentieth-century political science literature on colonial governance was vibrant, geared toward shaping both policy and public opinion, and universally informed by the belief that fundamental race difference made imperialism both a necessary and a thorny endeavor.

In the book's final chapters, Blatt highlights the persistence of racial commitments at the heart of political science even as the young discipline evolved away from its Hegelian origins toward the scientific methods that would herald the behavioral revolution. Here University of Chicago political scientist Charles Merriam emerges as a leading figure, and the quest to secure disciplinary prestige and funding drives political scientists’ efforts to reorient their methodologies toward those of the natural sciences during the interwar era. Even as Merriam and his colleagues departed significantly from the founding generations’ approach to studying politics, however, their “reconstructed political science” (p. 115) still embraced assumptions about human populations that gave primacy to essential racial difference. The rise of psychometric testing, most prominently in the form of intelligence scales that reinforced then-prevailing beliefs about disparities across racial groups’ mental capacities, was especially influential on this scientifically minded generation of political scientists, who saw in it the possibility for identifying civically relevant traits and engineering an ideal citizenry.

Blatt bookends her treatment of the racial project of political science at the turn of the twentieth century with a much more recent disciplinary development—namely, some twenty-first-century political scientists’ efforts to ascertain the genetic sources of political attitudes and behavior. In “re-describ[ing] political difference in ascriptive terms,” she posits, this new approach has “retooled themes that were present in U.S. political science at its origins” (p. 138). This discussion takes some steps toward establishing the contemporary relevance (i.e., the “so what?”) of Blatt's historical analysis, but it begs the question of whether there may be other, less obvious ways in which political science today carries on the racial traditions of its forebears. One limitation of the book is that Blatt does not tackle this concern, nor does she consider whether and how it matters that this new field of “empirical biopolitics” (p. 138) has emerged within a discipline that is far more diverse and internally differentiated than that of a century ago.

Race and the Making of American Political Science nevertheless contributes substantially to our understanding of how political science took shape in the American context and just how central turn-of-the-century understandings of race were to its development. As such, this is a book that should be widely read and discussed. In addition to prompting consideration of the long-range implications of the discipline's early racial commitments, it should invite contemporary political scientists to grapple with their professional heritage and to reflect on how their own work embodies fundamental assumptions about human aptitudes and behavior.