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History and Dissent: Bernard Crick's The American Science of Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

MICHAEL KENNY
MICHAEL KENNY
Affiliation:
The University of Sheffield
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Abstract

This article revisits the critique of political science outlined in Bernard Crick's (1959) The American Science of Politics. Although this work inspired a number of subsequent critics of the discipline and survives in the footnotes of many historical accounts of political science, its contents are now largely overlooked or forgotten. Having reconstructed its main arguments, I explore the mixed critical response this work elicited on publication, and then seek to explain why its influence was so short-lived. An important reason for its inability to deflect the discipline from its chosen course lies in the very distinctive republican–liberal project that guided Crick's thinking in these years. A critical reengagement with this text is worthwhile, I argue, both because it illustrates the importance of the migration of ideas and thinkers to the tradition of political science critique, and because Crick provides a strikingly different kind of argument for methodological pluralism and political relevance than that which is offered today by critics of political science.

Type
“THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE” ESSAYS
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 100 , Issue 4 , November 2006 , pp. 547 - 553
Copyright
© 2006 by the American Political Science Association

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