Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the
Discourse of Democracy. By John G. Gunnell. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 289p. $40.00.
John Gunnell laments the ignorance of our own past in political
science and is determined to get us to understand the richness of
earlier generations of political scientists and theorists who focused
on the American incarnation of democracy. The key task of this book is
to examine the discipline's understanding of democracy, with a
focus on the conversations surrounding conceptions of the state,
liberalism, and, especially, pluralism. On this, Gunnell offers a
comprehensive and enlightening history of some of the central defining
discourses of political science and political theory, interwoven with
discussions of how this history relates to the development of political
science as a discipline.