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This text serves as a guide to the state of political science and features contributions from major international scholars. It provides a point of reference for anyone working in political theory and focuses on a particular aspects of the discipline including public policy, political economy and more.

The political science major requirements at Bryn Mawr are characterized by a great deal of flexibility. This is at first glance a good thing, but on second thought we may begin to feel a bit guilty about our relative lack of structure, as though we were getting away with something—especially in the context of the Bryn Mawr ethos in which rigidity and departmental insularity are generally taken to be the surest signs of academic excellence. (The really best, most respectable, majors are the toughest—i.e., the ones that require students to take the most courses within the department.) Is the political science major at Bryn Mawr respectable? Or does this department treat its students as the pastry cooks in Plato's Gorgias treat children, stuffing them with the yummies they foolishly desire, and so easily defeating the heroic attempts of good doctors to persuade the young to take the salutary medicine their health requires?

Since emerging in the late nineteenth century, political science has undergone a radical shift--from constructing grand narratives of national political development to producing empirical studies of individual political phenomena. What caused this change? Modern Political Science--the first authoritative history of Anglophone political science--argues that the field's transformation shouldn't be mistaken for a case of simple progress and increasing scientific precision.

Scientific debate requires a common understanding of what constitutes good research. The purpose of this article is to establish such an understanding. The purpose of political science is to uncover, understand and explain the conformist aspect of social behavior, well aware that not all behavior is systematically determined by society. Good political science ought to be grounded in two questions: What do we know, and what are we going to learn? Research question and theory are decisive, while all discussion about methodology and design is about subjecting our prejudices and expectations to the most difficult test possible. The binary opposites we are familiar with from the 'Methodenstreit' of the social sciences are unproductive. Adapted from the source document.

That politics and economic life have much to do with each other is a remark matched in self-evidence only by the parallel observation that political science and economics are of mutual interest. All the more striking then is the difficulty one meets in attempting to state with precision how politics and economic life, or how political science and economics are related.Consider for example the view that politics is the ceaseless competition of interested groups. Except under very rare conditions, as for instance the absence of division of labor, economic circumstances will preoccupy the waking hours of most men at most times. Their preoccupations will express themselves in the formation of organizations, or at least interested groups, with economic foundations. Politics, so far as "interest" means "economic interest" (which it does largely, but not exclusively), is the mutual adjustment of economic positions; and to that extent, the relation between politics and economic life seems to be that political activity grows out of economic activity. But the competition of the interests is, after all, an organized affair, carried out in accordance with rules called laws and constitutions. So perhaps the legal framework, the construction of which surely deserves to be called political, supervenes over the clashing of mere interests and even prescribes which interests may present themselves at the contest. Thus politics appears to be primary in its own right.

THE HISTORY OF THE DISCIPLINE OF POLITICAL SCIENCE IN WEST GERMANY IS AS CONTRADICTORY AS THE HISTORY OF THE COUNTRY ITSELF. LONG-TERM, MEDIUM-TERM, AND SHORT-TERM EFFECTS HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE. LONG-TERM EFFECTS WERE EXERTED BY SCIENTIFIC TRADITIONS AND INTELLECTUAL STYLES THAT WERE FORMED BY EARLY AND FUNDAMENTAL DECISIONS IN THE GERMAN UNIVERSITY SYSTEM. MEDIUM-TERM EFFECTS WERE THE RESULT OF THE NEED TO DEFINE AND ESTABLISH A NEW DISCIPLINE ALONGSIDE ALREADY-ESTABLISHED AND RELATED DISCIPLINES AND WERE THE RESULT OF THE DOMINANT ROLE OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE. SHORT-TERM EFFECTS ARE DUE TO THE CURRENT-AFFAIRS ORIENTATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND STEM FROM THE POLITICAL SYSTEM AND FROM INTERVENTIONS INTO THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM.

Political philosophy as we know it blossomed with the arrival of European immigrants like Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Eric Vogelin after World War II. These refugee scholars challenged their American colleagues in at least three important ways. They dared political scientists to be more morally conscientious, to focus on matters of real importance, and to develop a more refined historical sensibility.These authors suggested that the fact/value distinction at the center of the social scientific enterprise was indicative of a moral decay at the center of Western civilization. This decay paved the way for Nazism in the twenties and thirties, and possibly would contribute to Soviet victory in the Cold War if changes were not made. Less Cassandra-like was their charge that political scientists were primarily interested in refining the study of the insignificant. What they could measure through their dominant methods—public opinion, voting patterns, etc.—was trivial in comparison to the classical analysis of regime types, or the nature of man, or the purpose of the common life.As a result, these philosophers offered history, unabashedly Western history, as a resource for studying these timeless questions of political inquiry. To their minds, questioning the nature of tyranny, or the status of authority, was still worthwhile; fundamental, in fact. They encouraged other political scientists to incorporate these themes into their practice. Indeed, Steven Smith's contribution to this colloquy represents a renewed effort in this vein.