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Identities, Interests, and the Future of Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2004

Rogers M. Smith
Rogers M. Smith
Affiliation:
Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. E-mail [email protected]
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Extract

One of the central tasks facing any discipline is deciding what topics, among a vast range of possibilities, to feature in its research agenda. Once a discipline's practitioners have settled on the agenda, they must then determine what methods can best illuminate those topics. This essay argues that political science today needs to give higher priority to studies of the processes, especially the political processes, through which conceptions of political membership, allegiance, and identity are formed and transformed. To do this, we need to identify, to a greater extent than most political scientists have, the historical contexts of the conflicts and political institutions that have contributed to political identities and commitments, and our approaches must provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values. We cannot rely solely, or even predominantly, on efforts to identify abstract, ahistorical, and enduring regularities in political behavior such as those that prevailed during the behavioralist era of modern American political science. Nor can we depend primarily on approaches, ascendant in our discipline's more recent “rational choice” phase, that enhance our formal grasp of instrumental rationality. Those sorts of work can certainly offer important contributions, but in general they are most effective as elements in projects that rest extensively on contextually and historically informed interpretive judgments.Rogers M. Smith is the author of Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale University Press, 1997). For their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, the author thanks discussants and audience respondents from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in September 2002, and the Yale Conference on Problems and Methods in Political Science in December 2002. He also thanks the editorial staff and anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics for many helpful suggestions and corrections.

Type
SYMPOSIUM
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 301 - 312
Copyright
© 2004 American Political Science Association

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