Race and the Making of American Political Science. Jessica Blatt
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For that reason, I make no pretense of offering a comprehensive disciplinary history. Instead, I focus here on a series of founding moments or transitions identified in previous historiography and on how in those settings political scientists addressed racial topics or, alternatively, addressed the kinds of questions to which “race” is often an answer. Racial ideologies tell stories about how the social world is configured, the sources of those configurations, and how permanent or susceptible to change they might be. To get at how these stories have figured in political science, then, this book looks primarily at political scientists’ explicit and implicit accounts of the deep sources of political difference and hierarchy, the forces driving political change, and the bases of political solidarity.
In that sense, political science is as much the site of this study as it is its object. All the same, Race and the Making of American Political Science speaks to a number of historiographical questions about the discipline. Most obviously, it speaks to the place of race in the discipline’s history (and, to an extent, in its present). The last decade or so has seen an explosion of scholarship on the ways in which anthropology, sociology, criminology, and other social sciences at once responded to and helped to shape racial ideology and the U.S. racial order.22 Vitalis and others writing about the racial entailments of international relations scholarship have brought political science into this conversation; a few more granular analyses of particular figures or institutions have begun to do the same for the study of U.S. politics.23 However, the role of racial ideas in U.S. political science’s history more generally has not received extended, systematic attention until now.
This may be because U.S. political science is often tightly identified with liberalism. Bernard Crick’s early, pathbreaking history of the discipline depicted American political science as shot through with a liberal “moralism” that sought, in his words, to “take the politics out of politics.”24 For Ross, political science, like the American social sciences more broadly, was born of a liberal, exceptionalist impulse to “naturalize the historical world.”25 Gunnell in turn sees “defining, explaining, and evaluating the United States as a democratic society” as “the defining mission of political science”; for Adcock, U.S. political scientists served to “Americanize” European liberalism by adapting it to the social and industrial realities on their side of the Atlantic.26
This focus on the liberal and democratic strains of U.S. political science is warranted and revealing. At the same time, it may obscure the ways in which illiberal ideologies, too, mark our history and shape our practice. Ido Oren explores this theme, showing that at important moments major U.S. political scientists have only taken issue with authoritarian or even fascist regimes when those regimes came into conflict with the American state.27 Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that racial ideologies underwrote authoritarian and exclusionary doctrines within political science and also that racialism shaped the technocratic strains of American liberalism that Crick and others find at the heart of U.S. political science.28
If the identification of political science and liberalism may have discouraged attention to the discipline’s racial commitments, so too may the fact that it has often been set apart for its relative inattention to racial topics. Specifically, critics take the discipline to task on the grounds that for much of its history, and to a degree still, U.S. political science has failed to take “race” seriously as an element and product of political life. In Rogers Smith’s gloss, after a late nineteenth-century “period of explicit disciplinary racism,” students of politics in the United States “devoted less attention to race” than did their counterparts in other disciplines, and certainly less than was warranted by the profoundly racialized dynamics of U.S. politics.29
This narrative captures an important truth. There is no question that for much of the twentieth century the political science mainstream failed to view racial oppression and hierarchy as problems that fell within its bailiwick. In 1970, Mack Jones and Alex Willingham found that political scientists excluded both the African American experience and systems of racial oppression from “fundamental political questions about the nature of society.”30 The following decade saw African American political scientists arguing that the study of race was “an academic graveyard” in a field for which African American politics were largely “invisible.”31 In 1985, Ernest J. Wilson III published an article titled, “Why Political Scientists Don’t Study Black Politics, But Historians and Sociologists Do.”32 Twenty-two years later, he found that, despite progress, “African American issues” were “still at the margins” of political science. Similar patterns have been documented for people of color more broadly.33
For Smith, this marginalization of racial topics dates to around 1920, when the “explicitly racist” scholarship of the founding generations began to give way to the idea that “race” was “pre-political,” “generated at root by biology and/or economics and/or culture and/or history and/or often unconscious or at least informal social psychological process and social activities.”34 This conforms to the findings of a 2011 discipline-wide task force that found that political scholarship still “tends to treat identity as given and outside of analysis” rather than “as a core analytical category for understanding important aspects of political behavior, social movements, and the development of public policies.”35 That is, Jones and Willingham’s observation of almost half a century ago—that political scientists to a troubling degree fail to treat “race” as integral to the realm of “politics”—still holds.
In one sense, the story this book tells runs counter to this narrative by showing that the racialism of political science’s founders marked the discipline more profoundly than we have acknowledged.36 In my account, the “explicit disciplinary racism” that Smith and others have noted in fact signaled a deeply racialized worldview that helped to give form and content to the practice of political science at its origins. At a deeper level, however, my account documents the origins of the disconnect these critics note. That is, if “race” was expelled from “politics” to some “pre-political” sphere, it was not because race suddenly came to seem insignificant. Rather, this shift was connected to an intense engagement with the idea of race.
This part of my account also situates political science within a broader process of the co-production of racial politics, race science, and the social sciences more broadly. For George Stocking Jr., the Boasian turn in anthropology in many ways constituted the condition of possibility for the social sciences as we know them. Specifically, he argues that the social sciences themselves only achieved their modern form when the holistic, organic, “shuttling” between “nature” and “culture” that characterized Victorian race theory was replaced, in large part through the efforts of Boasian anthropologists, with a meaningful distinction. In this new paradigm, the social appeared as something like an autonomous domain, built on a substrate of biological possibility and constraint. The latter, too, was more clearly delineated, meaning that just as “the social” achieved independent status, the life sciences saw their own questions and territory sharpened and defined in the same process. If this shift in racial thought was key to bringing into focus the modern projects of anthropology, sociology, and even biology, my account suggests that it played a similar role for political science, contributing to new conceptions of the discipline’s purpose, methods, and scope—a scope that, not incidentally, often excluded “race” by consigning it to those other realms.37
Chapter 1
“The White Man’s Mission”: John W. Burgess and the Columbia School of Political Science
Much of the credit for establishing the study of politics as a distinct learned discipline in the United States goes to John W. Burgess. A constitutional scholar, teacher of future presidents,1 and prominent commentator on domestic and foreign affairs, Burgess “more than anyone else … established the disciplinary, professional, and intellectual foundations” of political science in the United States.2 He articulated the paradigmatic theory of the emerging discipline, taught its first cohort of American-trained PhDs, helped to found its first U.S.-based scholarly journal and association, and fought successfully to establish