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Foundations in the United States have long exerted considerable power over education and scholarly production. Although today's titans of philanthropy proclaim more loudly their desire to transform schools and universities than did some of their predecessors, philanthropic programs designed to reshape educational institutions are at least a century old. In Foundations and American Political Science, Emily Hauptmann focuses on the postwar Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller programs that reshaped political science. She shows how significant changes in the methods and research interests of postwar political scientists began as responses to the priorities set by their philanthropic patrons.Informed by years of research in foundation and university archives, Foundations and American Political Science follows the course of several streams of private philanthropic money as they wended their way through public universities and political science departments in the postwar period. The programs launched by the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller philanthropies as well as their reception at the universities of California and Michigan steered political scientists towards particular problems as well as particular ways of studying them. The rise of statistical analyses of survey data, the decline of public administration, and persistent conflicts over the discipline's purpose and the best methods for understanding politics, Hauptmann argues, all had their roots in the ways that postwar universities responded to foundations' programs. Additionally, the new emphasis universities placed on sponsored research sparked sharp disputes among political scientists over what should count as legitimate knowledge about politics and what the ultimate purpose of the discipline should be

The division of curricular labor in most departments usually leaves teaching methods courses to only a small portion of the faculty. And in most departments, there is little overlap between those who teach methods and those who teach political theory. When I began teaching almost twenty years ago, I would have ranked "methods" towards the bottom of courses I expected or wanted to teach. But a few years ago, that began to change. Since 2006, I have team-taught a graduate course in Qualitative and Interpretive Methods and an undergraduate course in Scope and Methods of Political Science. This spring, I will offer The Logic of Political Inquiry, a graduate course on the history of the discipline and the philosophy of the social sciences. Several circumstances (which I touch on below) made it possible for me to teach this array of courses.

In this essay, I rely primarily on unpublished documents from the Rockefeller Foundation Archives as well as the annual reports of the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to show that rather than being in a torpor, political theory in the 1950s was a large and eclectic field, marked by contest and rapid change. I focus on the Rockefeller Foundation's policy making for its program in Legal and Political Philosophy (LAPP), the largest grant program for political theory in the 1950s, both to see how the Foundation justified the creation of the program and how it defined its scope. I argue that when faced with the task of settling on a working definition of 'political theory' for the purpose of awarding grants, the Foundation's officers and the academics who assisted them opted, after prolonged debate, for an eclectic definition of political theory. I read the emergence of this eclectic definition of political theory, however, not as evidence of pacific pluralism but as an attempt to contain some of the new challenges to the field by incorporating them into it, albeit in a subordinate position. Adapted from the source document.