Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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or sound project of political reform.18 Similarly, members of both generations shared in a wider consensus that the legal and administrative principles appropriate to governing “backward” races abroad applied as well for the government of racial others at home.
If these ideas crossed theoretical and methodological divides, so too were they shared across political ones. For example, Burgess, along with many of his contemporaries, opposed McKinley-era colonial expansion on the grounds that it would expand government power and saddle the developing American state with new race problems when it could barely handle the ones it already had. The Wilsonian generation, by contrast, accepted both more active government and U.S. colonialism as pragmatic responses to new economic and geopolitical realities. Leading scholars active in the APSA and elsewhere sought to craft models of domestic and imperial governance that would accommodate American values to scientific knowledge about racial difference. For many of these writers, different levels of evolutionary progress meant that the “darker races,” both at home and abroad, would most likely require a semipermanent subordinate status appropriate to each group’s degree of evolutionary progress. Others saw racial evolution as a field for intervention and uplift. However, commentators on all sides of this debate agreed that what Blakeslee and Hall’s pathbreaking international relations journal would dub “race development” was at the heart of the question.
That is, until roughly the beginning of World War I, multiple, distinct intellectual and political projects rested on the assumptions that “races” were the primary units of political life and that racial evolution was an appropriate framework in which to understand political change. Again, these projects differed in their political prescriptions and their degrees of optimism about the possibility of more egalitarian relationships between racial groups. However, in each of them the idea of essential racial capacities or traits marked both the grounds and the limits of that possibility.
Chapters 5 and 6 trace a break with this consensus, and the emergence of new understandings of both racial and political difference. After World War I, notions of organic unity were harder to sustain. One response came from “pluralists” such as Harold Laski, who put internal differentiation at the center of democratic theory. Many political scientists, too—particularly a group that coalesced around the brilliant academic entrepreneur Charles E. Merriam, the University of Chicago, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)—began to perceive organic, racialist accounts of political difference as “traditional” and “authoritarian” and to cast about for suitably scientific alternatives. Merriam and his colleagues were less centrally preoccupied with issues of white supremacy and colonialism than were many of their predecessors. Nonetheless, it was again to race science that this group looked for new accounts of human difference more suitable to a usable, empirical science of politics.
As they groped for conceptions of political life more consonant with the ferment they saw in interwar American life, Merriam and the group he gathered around him put great stock in the idea that scientific methods could anchor political judgment and point to possibilities for “social control” in the face of rapid social, economic, and political change. They correctly perceived, however, that for all its attempts, the discipline had thus far failed to break free of teleology, historicism, and what one writer called “race mysticism.”19 To complete this break, they turned to new theories of race and historical change coming out of other fields. They showed particular interest in a critique of race-based “stage” theories of civilizational development that was being elaborated by the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. From the Boasian critique, Merriam and others drew the lesson that the modern state was the product of contingency and change. This suggested that modern political processes and institutions could be studied on their own terms, independent of racial essences or deep historical-evolutionary analysis. It did not lead them to abandon the idea of innate racial difference. (Neither, incidentally, did it lead all of the Boasians to do so, at least not immediately.) It did, however, open up the question of additional bases for the differences, political and otherwise, between groups.
Along with many of his students and colleagues, Merriam saw tantalizing possible answers to that question in frameworks and technologies of human measurement coming out of psychology and biology. Several of them showed special interest in the large-scale, World War I army intelligence-testing program designed by Yale University psychologist Robert Yerkes, as well as in studies of racial difference carried out under the auspices of the National Research Council (NRC). In those settings, difference assumed a new form. What psychologists and race researchers seemed to be finding weren’t essential group characteristics, exactly, but instead uneven distributions of traits (such as “intelligence”) within and between populations. Moreover, racial differences were not the only kinds identified. The intelligence tests, for example, produced seemingly useful knowledge about intra-racial difference (such as the finding that white officers showed a higher “mental age” than white draftees).
These findings offered intriguing possibilities for understanding and managing difference within a pluralistic democracy, and a number of political scientists sought to capitalize on those possibilities. Many political scholars (most of them close to Merriam in some regard) found in “differential psychology” and “social biology” inspiration for a renovation of political science. If intelligence and other traits could be measured and mapped between and within populations, many reasoned, other, more properly political qualities might be treated in the same way. And if this were possible, a quantitative, methodologically rigorous science of politics might be poised to offer reliable diagnoses of what ailed the polity and to prescribe cures.
This hope was both intellectual and political. But it was also connected to local, institutional concerns—it was not lost on this group that psychologists and natural scientists had secured major funding for their efforts, and political scientists, for the most part, had not. Chapter 6 documents a series of attempts to replicate or latch onto the successes of those fortunate colleagues. Some of those experiments bore fruit in terms of both knowledge and institutional success—early research in political psychology is one example. Others, such as an abortive bid to bring the social sciences into research funding structures created to foster the natural sciences, did not pan out as hoped. However, I show that, successful or not, in the course of these efforts political scientists began to articulate new visions of political difference. (In many cases, they also secured sizable amounts of foundation money for political research.)
In short, as they engaged with innovations in anthropology, psychology, and the natural sciences, a number of important political scientists began to talk about politics in a new way and to elaborate new structures in which to do their work. Political institutions—once a reflection of the character and evolution of monolithic, racialized “peoples”—began to appear instead as the more or less contingent product of interacting historical, sociological, psychological, and biological factors. It wasn’t always clear where those differences came from (biology, society, psychology, etc.), or how stable they were. But the job of answering those questions was properly left to other disciplines. Political science could busy itself with mapping, analyzing, and thinking about how to control them.
A Note on Race, Political Science, and Disciplinary History
As John Gunnell points out, when we are not tracing our origins to Plato or the Enlightenment, U.S. political scientists have traditionally consumed our own history in the form of intradisciplinary debates—narratives about how the perspective or methods with which we identify emerged from earlier, flawed ones, for example; or how the currently dominant tendency has overtaken some earlier, more promising one. These accounts certainly enrich our understanding, but, as Gunnell also observes, they are perhaps better understood as “events in the history of political science,” rather than as satisfactory treatments of that history.20 Fortunately, in recent decades they have been supplemented by a rich body of serious, far-reaching disciplinary histories, with Gunnell as perhaps the leading scholar and with key contributions from Dorothy Ross, James Farr, John Dryzek, and Richard Adcock, among many others.21
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