Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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“socially constructed,” map on to meaningful biological differences. Similarly, if genes and politics researchers are right, “gender gaps” in voting behavior constitute powerful evidence against feminist briefs for the social construction of gender. In short, all sorts of observed racial, gender, and other disparities might be biological in origin and, by implication, less susceptible to change than liberals (in thrall to their genes, no doubt) might like to believe.
Specific arguments aside, it is clear that this literature is part of a larger resurgence in biological determinism in the United States in the twenty-first century. That resurgence has taken the form of bald-faced racism, as in the newfound prominence enjoyed by white supremacists (the so-called “alt-right”). It also takes more benign-seeming forms, such as the commercialization of racially specific medicine, a thriving ancestry-testing industry, and the column inches given to deterministically minded science writers like Nicholas Wade.10 Many scholars fear that this cultural and scientific moment bodes a return to past follies, as when early twentieth-century eugenics advocates wrote confidently of hereditary “unit characters” for everything from “pauperism” to “ability in literary composition” and “tha-lassophilia” (“love of sailing”).11 Claims about innate social and political characteristics can also seem to open a door to the rehabilitation of long-discredited theories of innate race and sex differences or even a “backdoor” to ethically murky human engineering efforts.12
This book focuses on the early years of U.S. political science, not its current state. I discuss the discipline’s recent, partial embrace of biological determinism here because, just as it evokes an earlier, troubling moment in the history of science, it also recalls ideas central to U.S. political science at its origins. Now we are told that radical new research shows that “a correlation exists between political involvement and physiological predispositions” or that political liberalism is substantially determined by a genetic predisposition to “seek out new experiences.”13 However, the idea that our politics are born into us—indeed, specifically that some people are innately cut out for self-government and progress while others are by their very constitutions more suited to traditional forms of authority—was in a real sense the precept on which U.S. political science was founded in the late nineteenth century.
The Victorian scholars who formalized the study of politics in the United States in the 1880s did not have the language of “genes.”14 What they had was “race.” John W. Burgess and Herbert Baxter Adams, who between them founded the first two doctoral programs in politics in the United States, taught that Anglo-Saxons were the bearers of a “Teutonic germ” of liberty. It was Anglo-Saxons who created, and were fit to enjoy, democratic institutions. It was also they who carried forward the potential of civilization. As for the rest, some might eventually be assimilated, but most were more suited to authoritarianism (at home) or colonial domination (abroad). The first U.S.-trained cohort of political science PhDs learned that adhering to a priori fictions of equality and social contracts had only resulted in the disaster of the Civil War. Avoiding such a calamity in the future would require more reliable political judgment, based in a hard-headed appraisal of the truths of nature—particularly the truths about innate human difference. “Ethnology,” Burgess affirmed, constituted “elevated ground,” a “standpoint” from which researchers could get a clear view of the political world.15
If “Teutonic germ” theory had been idiosyncratic, the resonances with “empirical biopolitics” would be telling enough. However, as I will argue, the racial ideas it invoked were central to the paradigmatic theory around which the discipline was coalescing, uniting scholars who disagreed about much else. What’s more, these background racial assumptions long outlasted the specific tenets of “Teutonism.” Well into the twentieth century, major political scientists understood racial difference to be a fundamental shaper of political life. They wove popular and scientific ideas about racial difference into their accounts of political belonging, of progress and change, of proper hierarchy, and of democracy and its warrants. And they attended closely to changing scientific accounts of human difference, viewing these as basic to their own work. The impulse to describe political differences as natural ones, then, runs deep, and won’t seem to go away.
From National Soul to Independent Variable
The central argument of this book is that race thinking shaped U.S. political science at its origins far more profoundly than has previously been recognized. From the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, scholars of politics defined and continually reoriented their intellectual work in response to changing scientific notions of race and to the political imperatives of the racial order at home and abroad. Racial thought informed ongoing efforts to frame political science as a “real” science, and it was deeply implicated in major intellectual and institutional innovations as the discipline established itself within the American academy. This includes what may be the defining development for the study of politics in the United States: a gradual, and at times fitful, shift from a legalistic, historicist framework to liberal accounts of politics as the play of individuals, groups, and interests. In this sense, changing notions of racial difference were constitutive of a model of political life itself that continues to exert a powerful hold on our political imagination, outside the academy as much as within.
Some elements of this story have been told. For example, few if any recent considerations of late nineteenth-century American political science fail to note that it is rife with “essentially racist conclusions.”16 However, these are usually treated as regrettable ephemera—either secondary to more central contributions or shameful mistakes that were eventually left behind, leaving little trace. This is changing, particularly with regard to scholarship on international relations, thanks to important interventions by Robert Vitalis, Brian Schmidt, and others.17 Nonetheless, much work remains before we can fully appreciate the role of racial ideas and particularly the role of race science in the study of American politics, and the ways in which the racialized premises driving the study of international relations shaped U.S. political science as a whole.
Race and the Making of American Political Science contributes to that project by examining how racial ideas figured in a number of settings in which pioneering U.S. political scientists sought to stake out their intellectual territory and define their methods. These include Burgess’s Columbia University department in the 1880s and 1890s; the meetings, publications, and other activities of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in the decade following its founding in 1903; the pages of the first U.S.-based international relations journal, the Journal of Race Development (founded by George Blakeslee and G. Stanley Hall at Clark University in 1910); and, finally, in the 1920s, efforts by Charles E. Merriam and others to bring scientific methods to bear on political questions and to integrate the study of politics into an interdisciplinary social science matrix.
Chapters 1 through 4 show that, particularly at the discipline’s early, founding moments, notions of “race” and “politics” were often so deeply intertwined as to be hard to distinguish. As political science began to take shape within the academy, leading practitioners put racialist premises at the heart of their accounts of democratic legitimacy and sovereignty, the dynamics of political change, and the propriety and limits of political reform. For the founding generation, led by Burgess and deeply influenced by German political philosophy, this took the form of the Teutonic “state.” Burgess taught that American political institutions and particularly the American legal system represented the highest form to date of the development of the Anglo-Saxon “genius for liberty,” and he framed political science as the task of understanding and safeguarding that development. Subsequent cohorts of political scientists distanced themselves from the legal focus and idealist trappings of Burgess’s approach, seeking to bring greater realism and empirical rigor to their science. Despite these shifts, however, younger political scientists such as Woodrow Wilson and Henry Jones Ford continued to ground their accounts of political life in an evolving racial unity. Like Burgess and along with many of their contemporaries, Wilson and Ford treated political community as an aspect of racial life. They also saw “recognition” of racial difference—or