Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2016
Probably no two of the scholarly works punctuating the past quarter century better exemplify the intellectual voyage that Africanist political scientists have taken than do Thomas Hodgkin's pioneering classic, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (1956), and Crawford Young's recent admirable comparative study of political economy in Ideology and Development in Africa (1982). These two broadly comparative works reflect the major shift from the study of the processes of African self-assertion and decolonization–the quest for and acquisition of state power–which characterized the concerns of the first decade of that period, to the study of how that power is maintained and in whose interest and with what effectiveness it is exercised, foci which have increasingly become the preoccupations of the last decade.
The intention here is to examine some of the features of this intellectual trek–from first generation conventional studies of nationalism, elections, and constitutions to the current preoccupation with the state, class, and political economy–not by a travelogue of the journey, but by focusing upon an enduring issue, namely, the antinomy of universalism vs. relativism. The antinomy exists at two levels. The first is that of the individual scholarly endeavor and product; namely, does the product reflect (a) a generalizing and scientific mode of inquiry in which the scholar's intent and perspective is to identify uniformities and regularities–as well as differences–through systematic comparison? In short, is it nomothetic? Or is it (b), a mode that is idiographic, i.e., that aims to describe and to understand a phenomenon in all its configurative, situational, and cultural-historical particularity and uniqueness? The antinomy at the second and obviously related level concerns the conceptualization of the discipline by a particular set of practitioners as either (a) a social scientific endeavor aimed at generalization and universality, or (b) an intellectual vocation which is essentially descriptive and interpretive of political phenomena that are inherently historically and culturally relative to a particular human group or situation (cf. Fallers, 1968: 576; Pye, 1975: 6).
The title's limiting modifiers “American” (for political science) and “Tropical” (for Africa) could be–but we hope they are not–interpreted as reflecting either an Americo-centrism or an insensitivity to pan-Africanism. Also, America refers only to the United States and does not include Canada or Mexico. The delimitation is partly due to the article being an invited contribution in the form of a disciplinary self-critique to the 25th anniversary of the African Studies Association, whose membership is predominantly American (although the membership criterion is emphatically universalistic), and to the fact that for generally recognized reasons (linguistic limitations in Arabic North Africa and access constraints in white-dominated South Africa), the engagement of “American” political scientists from the United States has been, until recently, far more pronounced in the new states of Tropical Africa. The narrower focus underemphasizes the significant and enduring impact of the French and British traditions. Moreover, even the discussion of American political science herein is necessarily selective. Finally, the adjective “American” disguises the fact that, like the other social sciences, the discipline in all its hetereogeneity has an ancestry that is not nationality-bound; it is the legatee of the ages, most recently of the massive brain drain from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (e.g., Karl Deutsch, Carl Friedrich, Henry Kissinger, Leo Strauss, and many others).