American Political Science, Liberalism, and the Invention of Political Theory

Abstract

The contemporary estrangement of political theory from political science is in large measure the product of a quarrel that originated in the challenge to the values of U.S. political science initiated by émigré scholars during the 1940s. The behavioral revolution was in an important respect a conservative rebellion in defense of the values of liberalism and related notions of science, relativism, and historical progress that had traditionally informed the discipline. This controversy in the context of political science fundamentally structured the discourse of academic political theory and the contemporary constitution of the field both as a division of political science and as a wider interdisciplinary enterprise.