In 1968, the eminent political scientist David Easton wrote: "Political Science in mid-twentieth century is a discipline in search of its identity. Through the efforts to solve this identity crisis it has begun to show evidence of emerging as an autonomous and independent discipline with a systematic structure of its own." However, the search for identity has been characteristic of political science from its inception on the American scene. Initially, the discipline was confronted with the task of demarcating its intellectual boundaries and severing its organizational ties from other academic fields, particularly history. Subsequently, debate arose over goals, methods, and appropriate subject matter as political scientists tried to resolve the often conflicting objectives of its four main scholarly traditions: (1) legalism, or constitutionalism; (2) activism and reform; (3) philosophy, or the history of political ideas; and (4) science. By the late twentieth century, the discipline had evolved through four periods outlined by Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus in their informative work The Development of American Political Science: From Burgess to Behavioralism (1967). The four periods are the formative (1880–1903), the emergent (1903–1921), the middle years (1921–1945), and disciplinary maturity (1945–1990).

The Formative Period, 1880–1903

Before 1880, the teaching of political science was almost nonexistent. Francis Lieber, generally considered the first American political scientist, held a chair of history and political economy at South Carolina College (being the second incumbent) in 1835–1856. In 1858, he became professor of political science at Columbia College. Johns Hopkins University inaugurated the study of history and politics in 1876; but not until 1880, when John W. Burgess established the School of Political Science at Columbia University, did political science achieve an independent status with an explicit set of goals for learning, teaching, and research. Burgess, like Lieber, had been trained in Germany and sought to implement the rigor of his graduate training and the advances of German Staatswissenschaft ("political science") in the United States. Under his leadership, the Columbia school became the formative institution of the discipline, emphasizing graduate education that drew on an undifferentiated mix of political science, history, economics, geography, and sociology to develop theories.

The discipline grew rapidly in the formative years 1880–1903. Burgess, Theodore Woolsey, Woodrow Wilson, Frank J. Good now, and Herbert Baxter Adams brought fame and direction to the field with their pioneering works. Columbia began publication of the Political Science Quarterly in 1886; Johns Hopkins published the Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science (1882). New departments were formed and the first American Ph.D.s were awarded.

As with any new discipline, a lively debate ensued about the intellectual boundaries of political science, particularly as those boundaries related to history. There were those who envisioned the distinction in the words of Edward A. Freeman: "History is past politics and politics present history." Others eschewed the connection with history, arguing that law, economics, and sociology were more relevant to the discipline. Methods of study were also debated. Early advocates of a scientific approach argued with scholars who contended that the subject matter did not lend itself to the methods of the natural sciences. During this period, political scientists combined a strict research orientation with willingness to take an active part in public affairs. They dealt with current political issues in their scholarship, and took on the function of educating college students for citizenship and public affairs.

The Emergent Period, 1903–1921

With the establishment of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1903, political science asserted its independence as a discipline. More important, the formation of an association provided a vehicle through which to pursue recognized common interests effectively. Annual conventions fostered a lively exchange of ideas and continued organizational development. In 1906, the association launched the American Political Science Review, which soon became the leading professional journal in the discipline, containing notes about personnel in the profession as well as scholarly articles; in 1912, it had 287 subscribers, and by 1932, it had 580.

Growth continued at a rapid pace throughout the period. The association's membership rose from 200 to 1,500. In a canvass of university programs prior to 1914, it was determined that 38 institutions had separate political science departments and that an additional 225 had departments that combined political science with other disciplines, most frequently with history or history and economics. It is estimated that the annual output of Ph.D.s rose from between six and ten to between eighteen and twenty. The increase in domestically trained Ph.D.s Americanized the profession, whereas previously the majority of new professionals had earned their degrees at German and French institutions. Concomitantly, undergraduate instruction came to focus more on American government and less on comparative and European government and politics. Original research and reviews in the journals emphasized American materials.

While taking steps toward securing their discipline, political scientists were not reflective respecting the intellectual content of their field. Political scientists mostly studied political structures and processes using available official sources and records; their analyses were routine descriptions. The forward-looking and iconoclastic Arthur F. Bentley complained in his Process of Government (1908; p. 162) that "We have a dead political science." He, along with Henry Jones Ford and Jesse Macy, agitated for an empirical study of contemporary political events instead of mere perusal of dry historical documents.

The Middle Years, 1921–1945

The intellectual complacency of the second era was interrupted in 1921 with the publication of Charles E. Merriam's "The Present State of the Study of Politics" in the American Political Science Review. Impressed with statistics and the rigor of psychology, Merriam called for "a new science of politics" characterized by the formulation of testable hypotheses (provable by means of precise evidence) to complement the dominant historical-comparative and legalistic approaches. The discipline, according to Thomas Reid, should become more "policyoriented." Merriam was joined in his effort by William B.

Munro and G. E. G. Catlin—the three being considered the era's leading proponents of the "new science" movement. Merriam's work led to the formation of the APSA's Committee on Political Research, and to three national conferences on the science of politics. With Wesley C. Mitchell, Merriam was instrumental in creating the Social Science Research Council in 1923.

William Yandell Elliott, Edward S. Corwin, and Charles A. Beard, all opponents of "scientism," quickly moved to challenge its advocates. They questioned the existence of rigorous determinist laws and the possibility of scientific objectivity in the study of politics. They were concerned with the propriety of the participation of "scientists" in citizenship education and public affairs, endeavors that made objectivity difficult. The "scientists" responded by urging, in principle, that research become more important than civic education. However, the Great Depression and World War II made it difficult to contest the significance of civic responsibility. Thus, when the APSA president William Anderson pronounced in 1943 that the preservation of democracy and "direct service to government" were the foremost obligations of political science, he was representing the prevailing view of American political scientists.

The discipline continued to grow. The APSA doubled its membership. The number of Ph.D.s awarded annually increased from thirty-five in 1925 to eighty in 1940; the number of universities granting degrees expanded. On the basis of efforts made in 1925 and 1934 to rate the quality of the various departments, California, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Illinois, Michigan, Princeton, and Wisconsin ranked as the leaders.

Disciplinary Maturity, 1945–1990

The postwar world stage changed the priorities for the nation. The stark realities of the military and ideological struggle of American capitalism and democracy versus Soviet communism shaped the environment in which political scientists worked. Political science retained its fascination with American democracy and continued to be characterized by disciplinary disunity, which gave it strength through diversity and debate. Four major developments are evident during the Cold War period. Most obvious is the steadily increasing emphasis on mathematical models, making it difficult for nonspecialists to read political science journals by the late twentieth century. Second is the development of the "behaviorist" method in the 1950s and 1960s. Third is behaviorism's eclipse by "positive political theory" in the 1970s and 1980s. Fourth is the development of the field of comparative politics and area studies. Gradual evolution is evident in the subfields structuring the discipline, with "political philosophy and psychology," "government of the U.S. and dependencies," "American state and local government," "foreign and comparative government," "international organization, politics, and law," and "U.S. public administration," shaping political science in 1950; and with "political theory," "American government," "comparative politics," "international relations," and "public policy" shaping it in 1990. An increased interest in issues of gender and race relations added ethnic studies and the feminist perspective into professional studies and undergraduate curricula.

The development of political science between 1945 and the late 1960s was dramatic, although this growth subsequently leveled off. The APSA more than tripled in size as a membership of 4,000 in 1946 grew to 14,000 in 1966; in 1974 the APSA had 12,250 members, in 1990 it had 10,975 members, and by 2002 it had 13,715. More than 500 independent political science departments were in existence; all major U.S. universities had developed competitive political science programs. By the mid-1970s, more than 300 Ph.D.s were awarded annually over seventy-five departments offering doctoral programs. There were at least twelve major professional journals. The careers of Henry A. Kissinger (secretary of state in 1973–1977) and Joseph S. Nye Jr. (deputy undersecretary of state, 1977–1979, and later dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government) demonstrate that a career as a political scientist could serve as a vehicle for prominent public office, and vice versa.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism is best viewed as a broad-based effort to impose standards of scientific rigor, relying on empirical evidence, on theory building, in contrast to the legalistic case-study approach in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s. Harold Lasswell, Gabriel Almond, David Truman, Robert Dahl, Herbert Simon, and David Easton, the movement's leading figures, each contributed his unique view of how this goal could be achieved. The Political System (1953) by Easton and Political Behavior (1956) by Heinz Eulau and others exemplified the movement's new approach to a theory-guided empirical science of politics. Data gathered from public-opinion polls, initiated in 1935, and from social surveys were central to the movement. In 1946, the University of Michigan established a leading research program, the Survey Research Center, which undertook field studies of voting behavior and amassed data. It also created in 1962 the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which was designed to share precious data among its twenty-one-member community. By the 1980s, this consortium incorporated more than 270 colleges and universities, both in the United States and abroad. Statistics, as presented to political scientists in V. O. Key Jr.'s A Primer of Statistics for Political Scientists (1954), became an indispensable tool for analysis. Quantitative analysis became integral to graduate curriculum in political science, over time replacing the long-standing requirement of knowledge of two foreign languages.

The behavioral movement was informed by the logical positivist philosophy of Karl R. Popper, Hans Reichenbach, and Bertrand Russell, who emphasized cumulative scientific knowledge based on empirical testing of hypotheses. Although the method still exists in political science, it dissipated as a distinct intellectual movement in the early 1970s as Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) signaled a defeat for logical positivism by questioning its assumption of cumulative, fact-based scientific knowledge. As well, the social unrest over the war in Vietnam raised consciousness among political scientists that behaviorism could be perceived as amoral and irrelevant to the normative concerns governing human lives.

Positive Political Theory

From their initial enunciation in the 1950s, behaviorism and positive political theory, or rational choice theory, as it is also referred to, shared practitioners and research goals. Both drew strength from broad interdisciplinary support, which ranged throughout the social sciences for behavioralism and was found in economics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, mathematics, and public policy, as well as in political science, in the case of rational choice theory. Both emphasized general theory based on empirical tests. However, the two movements deviated in their precise method: behaviorism used data concerning human behavior to build and test theory; rational choice theory made deductive models of human interactions based on the assumption that individuals are self-interested rational actors.

Positive political theory was pioneered by William H. Riker, who built the powerful political science department at the University of Rochester and served as its chair from 1963 to 1977. Riker was not alone in his initiative to formulate a science of politics based on deductive models of rational self-interested action subject to empirical tests. He built his theory using John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's game theory, Duncan Black and Kenneth J. Arrow's mathematical analyses of voting, and Anthony Downs's economic theory of democracy. He also benefited from the work of other early advocates of the rational choice approach—Vincent Ostrom, James M. Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Mancur Olson, who together formed the Public Choice Society in 1967 and immediately thereafter established the journal Public Choice. These scholars turned the conventional study of politics upside down by considering politicians to be self-interested actors seeking to win office as opposed to officials serving the public. From its humble origins, rational choice theory became established as a disciplinary standard not just across the United States, but also worldwide by 1990. By 1987, 35 percent of the articles published in the American Political Science Review adopted the rational choice approach. The method's stellar success was due to its attraction of adherents, its interdisciplinary dynamism, its promise to deliver scientific results, its overlapping boundaries with the public policy, and its assumption of individualism shared with American philosophy of capitalist democracy.

Area Studies

While both behaviorism and positive political theory exemplify the commitment to scientific rigor hoped for by Charles Merriam, the Cold War development of area studies had a less direct relationship to its predecessors. Prior to World War II, Americans had been inwardly focused; during this earlier era, "comparative politics" signified contrasting European parliamentary-style democracy with the American presidential model. However, with the rise of Adolf Hitler's Germany and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, it became evident that democracy needed to be assessed in comparison to fascism and totalitarianism. As the world broke into the two camps of Eastern communism and Western democracy in the 1950s and 1960s, and American political leaders required detailed knowledge of Eastern bloc nations and of Southeast Asia, political science departments and specialized institutes responded to this need. These undertakings were generously funded by the National Defense Education Act (NDEA); from 1958 to 1973 the NDEA Title IV provided $68.5 million to the approximately 100 language and area centers. By 1973, these centers had produced 35,500 B.A.s, 14,700 M.A.s, and over 5,000 Ph.D.s.

Area studies focused on questions of modernization and industrialization and strove to understand the differing developmental logic of non-Western cultures; they embraced diverse methods for understanding native languages and native cultures and remained skeptical of approaches to comparative politics adopting universalizing assumptions. Lucian W. Pye, Robert E. Ward, and Samuel P. Huntington championed the approach, with Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (1996) epitomizing the perspective afforded by the field.

Political Theory

During the Cold War period, the study of political theory continued to include the great books of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Karl Marx, but it was reshaped by the influx of European émigrés. Leo Strauss, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Theodore Adorno stirred the imagination of American theorists through their perspectives developed under the duress of the Nazi occupation of much of Europe. Political theory, with its emphasis on timeless works and its input from European theorists, became international in scope during the Cold War period. Thus, European scholars such as Jürgen Habermas and J. G. A. Pocock were as germane to scholarly discussions as were the American theorists John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Emigrant scholars published in Social Research, and newfound interest in political theory among indigenous scholars was reflected in the more recently established journals Philosophy and Public Affairs (1971) and Political Theory (1973). Whereas much American political science saw the world from the perspective of the United States, political theory retained a critical edge: it was skeptical of social science methods boasting of objectivity, and of what might be regarded as a collusion between American political science and American democracy and capitalism.

General Political Science

Independently from well-defined movements, the mainstay of political science, American political institutions, political behavior, comparative politics, and international relations were pursued throughout this period by numerous methods. For example, a 1987 study found that the 262 political scientists contributing to legislative research adopted the following approaches in significant proportions: behavioral analysis; case studies; "new institutionalist"; organizational theory; historiography; positive political theory; democratic theory; and other approaches, including policy studies. Not necessarily representing a single school, prominent political scientists central to the field included Richard F. Fenno Jr., Nelson Polsby, Warren E. Miller, Harold Guetzkow, Donald R. Mathews, Samuel J. Eldersveld, Dwaine Marvick, Philip E. Converse, Donald E. Stokes, and Joseph LaPalombara.

Since 1990

In the 1990s, disciplinary divisions existed over the efficacy and merits of the rational choice approach to politics, with many American political science departments divided into camps for and against. In leading centers for rational choice, including Rochester, Carnegie Mellon, California Institute of Technology, and George Washington, as many as half of the faculty adopted this method of study. Disciplinary controversy culminated in the publication of Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (1994), and the responding issue of Critical Review (winter-spring 1995). Whereas the future of this disciplinary strife remains unclear, it is clear that the rational choice theory has an ascendant position across the social sciences and in the spheres of business, law, and public policy.

American political science continues to question its identity, and to reflect on appropriate research methodology; methodological pluralism continues to reign. The field's continued self-examination reflects three independent axes. One embodies the two extremes of particular and localized studies versus universalizing analyses; a second is defined by the extremes of considering either groups or individuals as the key to analysis; and a third is represented by the belief that a normative stance is unavoidable at one extreme, and by a firm commitment to the possibility of objectivity at the other extreme. In the midst of the numerous topics and methods structuring political science, one certainty is that it is no longer possible for a single individual to master the entire field.

Bibliography

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