Modern Schools of Politics Western Germany

Abstract

THERE IS NO SINGLE PREVALENT ‘MODERN SCHOOL OF POLITICS’ in Germany. Territorial fragmentation in the federal system and pillarization of the political subcultures and intellectual camps has had its impact on the organization of political science in Germany after the Second World War.The new discipline had some roots in German intellectual history, though even the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik (German Academy for Politics) out of which emerged the largest political science department in Germany, the Otto Suhr-Institute in Berlin, was no equivalent to the Ecole des sciences politiques in Paris or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Nevertheless the older German Staatswissenschaften had some impact on the founding fathers of American political science (Francis Lieber, J. W. Burgess, A. F. Bentley, and Charles Merriam).