Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2002
In a New Republic cover story published three years ago entitled “Irrational Exuberance: When Did Political Science Forget about Politics?” the journalist Jonathan Cohn (1999) lamented the disappearance of a certain kind of academic—typified by the Harvard professors James Q. Wilson, Samuel Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann—from contemporary political science departments. Wilson “was more than just a scholar,” Cohn wrote, “he was a public intellectual” whose “byline was as apt to appear on some policy-related article in the New York Times (or The New Republic) as it was on a peer-reviewed paper in the American Political Science Review.” Huntington, “arguably his generation's most influential student of international relations,” helped to start a popularly read foreign-policy journal. And Hoffmann, whose scholarship spanned “political theory, comparative government and international relations,” still found “time to write regularly for the New York Review of Books.”