Abstract
Although American political science is, as Bernard Crick emphasised, in many respects a distinctly American science of politics, its evolution has been deeply informed by European ideas. This was quite obviously the case during the nineteenth century, when the German concept of the state dominated the discourse of the field, as well as in the early part of the twentieth century, when English scholars made significant contributions to the theory of democratic pluralism. By the middle of the century, German émigrés had contributed to a fundamental transformation in political theory which challenged the mainstream vision of political enquiry; but what is less well understood is the extent to which the reaction to this challenge in behavioural political science was also based on ideas that were the product of the European exodus.
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1 This essay is largely a synoptic extraction from, and interpretative gloss, on my past and current research on both the history of American political science and the impact of the philosophy of science on the discipline, but it also draws heavily on the extensive literature that, during the past decade, has been devoted to the history of logical positivism and logical empiricism and particularly to the migration of this movement to the United States. The general history of American political science and particularly the impact of German philosophy on nineteenth-century American political science, and the impact of the German émigrés on political science and political theory beginning in the 1930s, are treated in much more detail in both Gunnell (1993) and Gunnell (2004), and the history of the historiography of American political science is examined in an appendix to the latter work. The relationship between political science and the philosophy of science is critically analysed in Gunnell (1975, 1986, 1998). Discussion of the comparative international development of political science can be found in Easton et al (1991) and Easton et al (1995) as well as in Gunnell (2002). My discussion of the history of logical empiricism relies to a large extent on Stadler (2001), Giere and Richardson (1996) and Hardcastle and Richardson (2003).
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Gunnell, J. the european geneses of american political science. Eur Polit Sci 5, 137–149 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210073
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210073