Political Science: Reflecting on Concepts, Demystifying Legends

Rainer Eisfeld's book highlights the merits of socio-historical research into topics infrequently covered by mainstream political science. Directing attention to the need for carefully scrutinizing the convenient "truths" of established - post-Nazi, post-Communist - political narratives, its chapters encourage reflection of the discipline's history and state of the art.

A companion volume to the 2012 book entitled Radical Approaches to Political Science: Roads Less Traveled (also published by Barbara Budrich), this collection is likewise based on an approach to political science informed by a theory of participatory pluralism and grounded in history. The chapters focus on the discipline's fragmentation and its retreat from public debate; on the varying roles of political science and international relations as champions of more or less democracy; on normative and analytical concepts developed by Hannah Arendt, Klaus von Beyme, and Robert A. Dahl; on the deconstruction of the "Peenemünde Legend" about the unspoiled rule of science at the Third Reich's missile development center; on reasons for the Peenemünde engineers' actual complicity in the exploitation of concentration camp labor to mass-produce their V-2 missile.

"Rainer Eisfeld's leadership in the fields of pluralism and analysis of the discipline in the International Political Science Association means that he has quite a background to share with us in this, his most recent, collection of essays."
John Trent

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction -- Preface -- What Political Science May (Not) Achieve -- Specialization and Teamwork: Current Challenges to the Discipline -- Political Science and Transition to Democracy: The German Experience -- Standing on the Shoulders of Giants -- The "Three Pillars of Hell": Hannah Arendt's Concept of Total Rule -- Sources, Merits, Limits -- Prospects of Pluralist Democracy in an Age of Economic Globalization and World-Wide Migration: A Tribute to Robert A. Dahl -- Klaus von Beyme: The Political Scientist as Global Scholar and Public Intellectual -- Two Profoundly Different Schools of Political Science -- Political Science in Great Britain and Germany: The Roles of LSE und DHfP -- From the Berlin Political Studies Institute to Columbia and Yale: Ernst Jaeckh and Arnold Wolfers -- Peenemünde: Challenging the Myth of Nonpolitical Technology -- Peenemünde, the V-2 and the Exploitation of Slave Labor. A Study in Reactionary Modernism -- The Peenemünde Legend: Origins, Perpetuation, Demise.

Rainer Eisfeld's book highlights the merits of socio-historical research into topics infrequently covered by mainstream political science. Directing attention to the need for carefully scrutinizing the convenient "truths" of established - post-Nazi, post-Communist - political narratives, its chapters encourage reflection of the discipline's history and state of the art. A companion volume to the 2012 book entitled Radical Approaches to Political Science: Roads Less Traveled (also published by Barbara Budrich), this collection is likewise based on an approach to political science informed by a