Disenchanted Realists, Second Edition , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Raymond Seidelman

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192 pages

English

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When it first appeared three decades ago, Raymond Seidelman's provocative study of the history of political science both attracted a great deal of attention and generated vibrant controversy. Where prior studies of the history of political science had concentrated on the evolution of the scientific study of politics, Seidelman placed his focus on the tenuous relationship between the scientific study of politics and the real world of American democracy. Examining paired sets of political science luminaries over a century, he finds recurrent hopes that a "science of politics" can be a "science for politics," and recurrent frustrations that neither elites nor democratic publics respond to the findings of political science or defer to its claims of scientific authority. Analyzing the reasons for political science's limited impact on democratic reform, Seidelman raises the prospect that the progressive dreams of American political science, rising and falling over the course of a century, may finally be exhausted.

For this new edition, Bruce Miroff and Stephen Skowronek have written a foreword that relates the genesis of the book and the career of the late Ray Seidelman, while James Farr, a distinguished scholar of political science history, has contributed an extensive afterword. Whether readers concur with or dispute Seidelman's conclusions about the practical significance of political science, they will be challenged by the scope and power of Disenchanted Realists. The book invites a new generation of political scientists to examine the problematic development of the discipline they practice and to reflect on the public meanings of what they do in their own careers.
Foreword by Bruce Miroff and Stephen Skowronek
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. The Impulse toward a Science of Politics, 1880–1900

3. Science as Muckraking: The Cult of Realism in the Progressive Era

4. Reform and Disillusionment in the New Deal

5. The Behavioral Era

6. The Eclipse of Unity

7. Conclusion: The End of the Third Tradition

Afterword: A Science of Politics, A Science for Politics by James Farr

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

USA

United States of America

20th century

History of the Americas

Activism

États-Unis

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	15 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781438455754
Langue	English

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Disenchanted Realists
Disenchanted Realists
Political Science and the American Crisis
Second Edition
Raymond Seidelman
With the assistance of Edward J. Harpham
Afterword by James Farr
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Ryan Morris
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Seidelman, Raymond.
Disenchanted realists: political science and the American crisis / Raymond Seidelman.—Second edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–4384–5573–0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5575-4 (ebook)
1. Political science United States History 20th century. 2. Liberalism United States History 20th century. I. Title. JA84.U5S44 2015 320.510973–dc23 2014017609
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword by Bruce Miroff and Stephen Skowronek
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. The Impulse toward a Science of Politics, 1880–1900
3. Science as Muckraking: The Cult of Realism in the Progressive Era
4. Reform and Disillusionment in the New Deal
5. The Behavioral Era
6. The Eclipse of Unity
7. Conclusion: The End of the Third Tradition
Afterword: A Science of Politics, A Science for Politics by James Farr
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Bruce Miroff and Stephen Skowronek
The authors of this foreword were long-time friends of Ray Seidelman and admirers of his most important scholarly work, Disenchanted Realists . Ray died in 2007 at age 56 after a four-year struggle with cancer. Subsequently, the political science editor at SUNY Press, Michael Rinella, suggested a second edition of Disenchanted Realists to bring Ray’s provocative and insightful history of the political science discipline to a new generation of political scientists. James Farr, a distinguished student of the history of political science and another friend of Ray’s, has written an afterword for this edition that situates the book among other disciplinary histories, assesses reactions to its arguments, and adds both a prequel and a sequel to the story it tells.
When Disenchanted Realists was published in 1985, it stood apart from prior and contemporaneous histories of political science. Other books on the history of the discipline—by Bernard Crick, Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, and David Ricci—primarily took a stand either in praise of or as a critique of the quest for a science of politics. Ray’s work was concerned with the relationship between the scientific impulse in political science and the desire to influence the real world of American politics. He wrote about prominent political scientists who envisioned the creation of a “science of politics” that would simultaneously be “a science for politics.” The purpose of political science, from their perspective, was not a detached body of objective truths but rather a growing repository of scientific knowledge that could reform and advance American democracy.
As the title of Ray’s book indicates, the hopes that a “science of politics” would elevate public life in the United States repeatedly met with frustration, and the discipline’s political ambitions gave way over time to a narrower pursuit of science for its own sake. Ray was nothing if not a political realist himself, and his history was not intended to be uplifting, much less for cheerleading about the progress of political science. Nonetheless, Disenchanted Realists did not yield to cynicism; on the contrary, Ray admired most of the political scientists whose frustrations he depicted. The enduring power of his work is found not only in his insightful history of the discipline’s struggle to combine science with democratic reform but equally in his insistence that his readers understand the nature of that struggle. Perhaps more than any other history of the discipline, Disenchanted Realists asks political scientists to reflect on the public meaning and significance of the work that they do.
Behind Disenchanted Realists lay Ray’s experiences as a political activist while an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Even more important in the genesis of the book were his graduate years at Cornell University. Ray entered graduate school in 1973. Political science was then in an unsettled state, with scholars questioning received paradigms (pluralism, behavioralism) and looking for new directions. The nation was in an unsettled state as well. The movement politics of the 1960s was waning, and the travails of the Nixon administration were about to shake the government to its foundations. Ray was none too certain of his course. He was full of questions about where scholars fit into the emerging political scene and where he himself fit within political science’s traditional divisions of labor.
Over the next several years, Ray took full advantage of the porous subfield boundaries he found at the Government Department at Cornell. He set out to study political philosophy with Isaac Kramnick but ended up writing a dissertation in comparative politics on “Neighborhood Communism in Florence” under the direction of Sidney Tarrow. In the interim, he worked on a manuscript about the study of American politics, producing the first draft of what would become Disenchanted Realists under the supervision of Ted Lowi. Whatever pressures there were at Cornell to specialize, Ray successfully resisted them. His reluctance as a graduate student to declare himself a political theorist, or a “comparativist,” or an “Americanist,” would continue through the rest of his career. Attracted to all three areas but reluctant to commit to one over the others, he was more naturally disposed than most to think broadly about his chosen field of study and to engage political science as a discipline with a project all its own.
During his first year at Cornell, Ray met two other political theory graduate students, Edward Harpham and Stephen Skowronek, whose intellectual agendas had much in common with his own. Each was, in his own way, interested in working through the relationship between scholarship and political life. The three rented a house together in the summer of 1974, and over the next two years, while cramming for general examinations, they sustained a discussion about the bearing of theory on practice, ideas on action, norms on empirics, intellectuals on power. They approached Ted Lowi with the idea of a reading course that would focus on how political scientists in America had grappled with these questions in the past, and he agreed on the condition that they produce joint work commensurate in scope to three extended term papers. They ended up with about 200 pages loosely organized around the problems faced by political scientists who had self-consciously sought to direct the discipline toward the advancement of American democracy.
Each of the housemates took something essential to his later intellectual development from that experience. Harpham went on to write about Adam Smith’s insights into the formation of a political economy; Skowronek, about the professional reform impulse in American state-building. By the time Ray returned from Florence and his study of the Italian left, all three were fairly far along on their own trajectories. Ray was eager to revive the joint project, to rework and expand its thesis, but in looking back at the old manuscript with the detachment of a few years, it was evident that pulling together a book would be an entirely new undertaking. Harpham agreed to help, but could not commit to the project full time. It was clear that if the idea was to bear fruit, Ray would have to take the lead and make it his own.
To write a history of the quest to combine “a science of politics” with “a science for politics,” Ray turned to the careers of such political science luminaries as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, V. O. Key, and David Truman. Framing his history was his conception of a “third tradition” in American political thought. The first tradition, as he defined it, was the institutionalism of the Federalists, which aimed to channel and control unruly human nature through the political architecture of a national constitutional system. The second tradition, associated with the Anti-Federalists and their populist successors, criticized institutional controls as safeguards for aristocracy and promoted radical democracy from the bottom up. Ray perceived a third tradition among leading political scientists that sought to surmount the antagonism between the original two traditions by achieving a distinctive synthesis between institutionalism and popular democracy.
Starting with the early progressives, political scientists in Ray’s narrative advocated a stronger national state in the vein of the Federalists, guided by trained experts such as public administrators. Yet these same political scientists sought to make this stronger state responsive and accountabl