History of the Caucus for a New Political Science
In: New political science: official journal of the New Political Science Caucus with APSA, Band 29, Heft 4, S. 501-507
ISSN: 1469-9931
This year, at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Chicago, the Caucus for a New Political Science celebrated its 40th anniversary, which makes the Caucus the oldest organized grouping of progressive political scientists in the United States. For the last 40 years, the Caucus has worked to support young & diverse scholar-activists pursuing a wide variety of theoretical & methodological projects with the goal of making the study of political science relevant to the struggle for a better world. The Caucus includes political scientists of diverse viewpoints, but it is united by the idea that the discipline should abandon "the myth of a value-free science" & openly advance a progressive political agenda. The Caucus has always advanced a critique of mainstream social science drawing on C. Wright Mills's observation that contemporary behavioralism is "a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by 'methodological' pretensions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues." Forty years after its founding, the Caucus continues to reject the mainstream scientific claim that politics can & should be studied apolitically. Adapted from the source document.