Suchergebnisse

In this article, the author reassesses Louis Hartz's book The Liberal Tradition in America in the context of the relationship between contemporary American foreign policy & domestic politics that have evolved since 2001. A reevaluation of the historical scholarship characterizes the work as a rhetorical exercise that treated the American tradition of liberalism metaphorically as a "storybook truth about American history," that is a "self-completing (Lockean) mechanism" that did not grow beyond an innocence that led Americans to view their enemies in "satanic terms". The author concludes that a true reading of The Liberal Tradition is better when considered to be less of a historical work than a personal essay that presents Weberian ideal types to interpret & understand social phenomena such as in The Protestant Ethic. J. Harwell

The existence of Kuhnian paradigm shifts in the US political science tradition is contemplated. It is contended that the proliferation of political scientific theories (eg, rational choice theory & institutionalism) does not constitute paradigm shifts; nevertheless, it is asserted that one paradigm shift has taken place within US political science. The transition between theories of the state & the emergence of the theory of democratic pluralism that arose during the 1920s & 1930s is interpreted as the only paradigm shift within US political scientific thought since the mid-19th century. After asserting that theories of the state had become stagnant in US political science by the early 1900s, scholarship that contributed to the rise of theories of democratic pluralism during the 1920s is identified. Even though theories of democratic pluralism were reworked prior to & immediately following WWII, it is argued that the behavioral revolution in political science during the 1950s does not represent a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Indeed, it is concluded that present-day political science scholarship continues to use the conceptions of political reality & democratic pluralism that were established during the interwar period. 20 References. J. W. Parker

While the American origins of the discipline of political science have often been noted and stressed, it has also been argued that the field has been fundamentally transformed as it has migrated and been adapted to new political and scientific contexts. There is thus a question of the extent to which it is still an American science of politics. Although one might assume that the recent genre of English language handbooks and state-of-the-discipline studies devoted to establishing the identity of political science would contribute to a better understanding of this matter, this literature has lacked an adequate historical perspective. Representative examples of this genre, both those generated in the United States and those with an ostensibly more international focus, have remained bound to an American vision of the past and present of the discipline and have failed to take account of recent scholarship on the history of political science.

A generation ago, Sheldon Wolin evoked an image of the vocation of political theory as an alternative to the behavioral program of theory and scientific inquiry that had come to dominate political science. His call also summoned those who believed that, in the midst of the political turmoil of the 1960s, the mainstream of the discipline had become politically quiescent and, at least by its inaction, even implicated in the political crises of the time. Intellectual and ideological choices were, indeed, involved, but Wolin was implicitly also giving voice to a professional identity for a large segment of the academic subfield of political theory that had been evolving for at least three decades. His articulation of the vocation was, however, as mythical as the method of science to which much of political science had subscribed, and these hegemonic legitimating myths ultimately could neither withstand critical scrutiny nor suppress the latent differences within each.