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Where is Political Science Going?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2004

Giovanni Sartori
Affiliation:
Columbia University

Extract

Political science, as we currently understand the label, was born, in Western Europe, in the early Fifties. One may say that it was “reborn”; but that would be inaccurate, for in the nineteenth century and until World War Two the label indicated a captive discipline largely dominated by juridical or historical approaches (as in the case, e.g., of Gaetano Mosca). So political science had a new start and became a field of inquiry in its own right about half a century ago. I was, at the time, one of its founders (with Stein Rokkan, Juan Linz, Mattei Dogan, Hans Daalder, Erik Allardt, S. N. Eisenstadt, and others. See: Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession, edited by H. Daalder, 1997). I am thus one of the witnesses of what the “young turks” of the time had in mind, of how we conceived and promoted political science. I am now an “ancient sage” and it now pleases me to reflect, some fifty years later, on where political science has gone and on whether it has taken the right course, the course that I had wished for and expected. Thus to ask today, in the middle of Mitteleuropa, where political science has been heading is also to ask whether the new beginnings of the discipline in Eastern Europe should or should not follow the path entered by our “big brother,” I mean, by American-type political science. I too have been somewhat swallowed by our big brother (to be sure, a benevolent and well meaning one) in the sense that I have been teaching in the United States for some thirty years. Let me add that I have largely benefited from my American exposure. Yet I have always resisted and still resist the American influence. And I take this occasion to say why I am unhappy about the American molding of present day political science.

Type
Symposium
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

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