The political dimension of American political science

Abstract

The Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS), emerged from a meeting of graduate students at the 1967 convention of the American Political Science Association. It is based on a demand for a new relevance in political science. Political science is considered irrelevant if it is uncritical of society and assumes the values and social priorities of corrupt bureaucracies, powerful elites or unjust social practices. The ’established’ political science profession is accused of justifying everything in the American political system as unique and workable and of condeming attempts to change it. Stability, rather than change, is the highest value, and conflict may be resolved peacefully and fairly within the existing system. The new conservatives desire to avoid major issues in favor of trivialities is mentioned. Behavioralism, emphasizing the fact/value dichotomy and preoccupied with questions of method and model-building, supports these conservative tendencies. Political scientists have become ideologues of the government. Professionalism and its rewards are determined less by the values and ethics of the discipline than by the values and ethics of the social and political status quo. A radical political science is needed to give more relevance to the political science profession. A radical political science can be defined as an attempt to use the tools which the discipline has created in order to solve the problems which society has created. There are three prospective lines of development for a radical political science: (i) a primarily theoretical one — the development of new paradigms for research and political analysis or new modes of inquiry; (2) the politization and democratization of the APSA and the reform of the discipline, teaching, curricula — with the CNPS as the pinwheel for reform; (3) the creation of a research-action political science focusing on criticism of American institutions and analyses of alternative social priorities.