Political Science as a Modernist Project

Abstract

The crisis of democracy is a vast and challenging topic that urges political science to dialogue with political history and political theory, and at the same time makes its implicit normative and methodological premises, its underlying influential metaphysics, particularly visible. When approaching this topic, how do political scientists use history? What does their way of using history say about political science as an intellectual enterprise? This essay aims to present some reflections by an academic historian on how these questions could possibly be addressed. It analyses how some political scientists think ‘with’ time, and what additional insights on the crisis of democracy can be gained by thinking ‘in’ time, as historians do. Moreover, it considers the anthropology that emerges from the works of political scientists. Finally, it reflects on the relationship that political science has with modernity: to what extent it can be considered a ‘modernist’ project, and whether a modernist approach is the best suited to understand a crisis of liberal democracy that is also, to a relevant extent, a crisis of both modernity and modernism.