In Praise of Political Science

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Is anyone's esteem for political science better suppressed than a political scientist's? Ordinary modesty is admirable, but his is professionally destructive. For, not only hiding his light under a bushel, he follows the more nihilistic course of blowing it out. Granted that many political scientists neither deprecate their discipline nor permit a low regard for it to stultify their work, I have been repeatedly assured by members of the profession that no social science is more retarded and none less promising for systematic theory. Thus they hide—even from their own eyes—their discipline's accomplishments. This I shall try to show, offering two books as evidence. There is other evidence, too. When even politically ignorant undergraduates complain that the major in political science is thin, no imaginable poverty of the field explains enough. Such a phenomenon proves concealment, either deliberate or unintended.

This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit: