Politics Denied: Comments on Waismel-Manor and Lowi's “Politics in Motion”

Abstract

For the last quarter-century, many political scientists—mostly dissidents within the discipline—have concurred with David Ricci’s conclusion in The Tragedy of Political Science that the discipline now serves “less as an instrument for solving problems than as a component part of the problem itself.” 1 Similarly, in Disenchanted Realists, Raymond Seidelman concluded that by the mid-1980s political scientists were at a “professional impasse” over the discipline’s focus, which signaled “an epitaph for political science as it has been practiced in the United States.” 2 Indeed, the political science discipline’s disengagement from politics and public policy became so striking by the end of the century that the New Republic asked its readers: “When did political science forget about politics?” The New Republic’s conclusion was that sometime after the publication of Ricci’s and Seidelman’s insightful critiques political scientists had changed from “an elite group of scholars characterized by a broad interest in politics and motivated explicitly by their desire to change the world around them” into a cloistered cabal of self-important “nerds.” The New Republic characterized the discipline’s retreat from politics into formal modeling and rational choice theory as a state of “irrational exuberance” over its growing detachment from solving the real problems faced by public officials and ordinary citizens just as the stock market detached from the “real economy” at the same time. 3 While the stock market’s irrational exuberance was temporarily corrected by the 2001 recession, the disciplinary elite in political science was challenged by the “Perestroika” movement. In 2000, many of the same discontents that led a previous generation of political scientists to organize the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) resurfaced in the “Perestroika rebellion,” which denounced the American Political Science Association as an organization controlled by “East Coast Brahmins” to promote a “narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches.” 4 When the younger Perestroika rebels were reminded that their criticism of the APSA was nothing