During 1968, members of the Association received questionnaires distributed as part of the Association’s agreement with the National Science Foundation to administer the political science section of the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel. Responses were received from 5,176 professional political scientists, and these responses were coded under the direction of Mrs. Carol Wheeler, the Association’s Register Supervisor, then forwarded to the National Register Group, Office of Economic and Manpower Studies of the NSF for tabulation. The 1968 Register is the first to include political science. Next survey of political scientists will take place in 1970.

The National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel obtains data pertaining to the academic training, employment, economic, and other professional characteristics of the scentific community directly from individual scientists. The seventh biennial registration of scientists, conducted in 1968, included scientists in the fields of chemistry, earth and marine sciences, atmospheric and space sciences, physics, mathematics, statistics, agricultural sciences, biological sciences, psychology, economics, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, and—for the first time—computer sciences and political science. Engineers are not included in this registration because an engineers register is maintained separately from the scientists register.

A summary of the characteristics of political scientists from the 1968 survey follows. Among the findings are that 59% have doctorates, 76% work for educational institutions, and 57% have the primary work activity of teaching. Among all 298,000 scientists surveyed 37% have doctorates, 40% work for educational institutions and 21% teach as a primary work activity.

I take my cue for the title of this paper from Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, who wrote in 1948 that “the political experience of the past thirty years oblige us to evoke the background of non-sense against which every universal undertaking is silhouetted and by which it is threatened with failure.” Merleau-Ponty refers to the experience of that generation of intellectuals for whom Marxism was a “mistaken hope” because it lost “confidence in its own daring when it was successful in only one country.” But this criticism is equally relevant for a new generation of intellectuals in America for whom the ideals of liberalism have been emptied of reality and have become little more than a super-rational mystique for the Cold War, a counter-revolutionary reflex in the third world, and a narrow perspective of social welfare at home. Merleau-Ponty argues that Marxism “abandoned its own proletarian methods and resumed the classical ones of history: hierarchy, obedience, myth, inequality, diplomacy, and police. Today intellectuals in America are making the same critique with equal fervor about their own lost illusions.

As we search for new ways to comprehend the social realities of American life and new modes of social thought and political action to reconstruct “the American dream,” Merleau-Ponty's notion of sense and nonsense guides us to see the historical relationship between ideologies and practice, between thought and action, between man and the world he creates. It symbolizes that recurrent fact in history whereby reason parades as unreason, where even “the highest form of reason borders on unreason.” We must learn from recent history that “the experience of unreason cannot simply be forgotten;” that the most noble claims to universal truth, the most rational modes of philosophical or social inquiry, the most convincing declarations of political leaders are all contingent, and should be subject to revision and open to criticism and change.

No general consensus exists concerning the status of American State and local government and intergovernmental relations as fields within the discipline of political science. Any attempt to make such an evaluation by gauging the attention given to these subjects in colleges and universities should distinguish between the two basic roles of American higher educational institutions—research and teaching.

Some observers have noted that in recent years political scientists have become increasingly interested in conducting research in American State and local government. As late as 1963, however, a large number of the members of the American Political Science Association responding to a questionnaire survey of trends in their discipline indicated that State and local government were areas in which the least significant work was being done. Yet, five years later, in a symposium on the advance of political science as a discipline, it was contended that:

State and local politics as a field of political science is no longer a ‘lost world’ or the site of ‘Dullsville.’ Rather than being the laggard of the discipline that some political scientists perceive it to be, the study of state and local politics has reentered the mainstream of political research. Much of the work in political science which has influenced the drift of the profession has been within its domain.

It is only fair to begin with an admission that a few years ago I would have regarded the title of this paper as an impossible self-contradiction. Scholarship was one concept; activism another. In those days, the two concepts appeared to me to be incompatible. One could, of course, expect to encounter activists who had been scholars, or who had at least received scholarly training; but one would not expect to find a scholar who was an activist at the same time. In the simplest and most general terms, scholarship implied withdrawal, and activism meant involvement. This, at least, was the tradition with which I was familiar. True, there was such a thing as it applied scholarship, but this applied to subjects with which I was not very familiar, nor was I very comfortable with the concept. It seemed to me that the scholar who was overly concerned with the application of his scholarship was not a true scholar and that he stood in danger of compromising his scholarly objectivity and integrity. Obviously, this was the point of view of a rather standard traditionalist, trained in a study of government which had deep roots in the orthodoxy of the humanities and – in my case — lesser roots in the social sciences, which in my student days still seemed more social than scientific.

This essay is a preview of a forthcoming reader on contemporary American political science. I wrote it, at the solicitation of the co-editors of the volume, as a foreword — not, as Michael Haas so quaintly persists in calling it, as a “preface” (which is something that an author or editor himself writes). The conventional role of the forewordist is to associate his name or position with the volume that he introduces, and to proffer a few hyperbolic pats on the back (or head) of the author before tiptoeing sedately offstage. But my subject is not an innocuous book, and I thought it would be insulting to the editors — and most certainly, inconsistent with their principal theses — if I were to give such a foppish performance at the threshold of a work intended to catalyze a revolution in the behaviors of the members of the political science profession. Editors Haas and Kariel thought otherwise, however; and because their view of professional ethics does not require them to festoon their book with a controversial point of view with which they disagree, what was written as my foreword to their book appears instead in this alternative forum and in the form of a preview.