The New Political Science APSA

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The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science

Clyde W. BarrowUniversity of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Abstract In 1967, the burgeoning discontent of many political scientists culminated inthe establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science. The Caucus included politicalscientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it was united methodologically by a critique ofbehavioralism and by the idea that political science should abandon the myth of a value-free science. In recent years, political scientists have authored numerous commentaries on“the tragedy” of political science, “the crisis” in political science, and “the flight fromreality in political science,” while in 2000 these discontents resurfaced in the“perestroika” rebellion, which again denounced the American Political ScienceAssociation as an organization that promotes a “narrow parochialism andmethodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, andformal modeling approaches.” This paper reviews the intellectual origins of New PoliticalScience by examining some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970spurporting to establish the foundations of a new political science. It concludes that newpolitical science offers a methodological critique of behaviorialism and a sociologicalcritique of the relationship between political science and political power, but there is noconsensus on what constitutes a new political science beyond its critical stance toward theexisting discipline.

The burgeoning discontent of many political scientists culminated in theestablishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) at the 1967meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The originalconstitution of the CNPS states that it was organized “to help make the study ofpolitics relevant to the struggle for a better world.”1 The Caucus included politicalscientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it was united by the idea that politicalscientists should abandon the myth of a value-free science and openly advance aprogressive political agenda.2 In 2000, many of the same discontents that led aprevious generation of political scientists to organize the CNPS resurfaced in the“perestroika rebellion,” which denounced the APSA as an organization controlledby “East Coast Brahmins” and one that promotes a “narrow parochialism andmethodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice,

1 Caucus for a New Political Science, “Constitution (as Revised Fall 1978),”(photocopy).

2 David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1984); Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis,1884–1984 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985).

New Political Science,Volume 30, Number 2, June 2008

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/08/020215-30 q 2008 Caucus for a New Political ScienceDOI: 10.1080/07393140802082598

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statistical, and formal modeling approaches.”3 In the wake of this latest rebellion,CNPS membership has roughly doubled, but aside from a vague discontent withthe existing discipline and its professional association, it is not likely that mostmembers of the organization can define the concept of a new political science.

This article explores the intellectual origins of New Political Science byreviewing some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970s that soughtto establish and clarify the foundations of a new political science. It concludesthat new political science was established as a methodological critique ofbehavioralism, an ideological critique of pluralist theory, and a sociologicalcritique of the relation between political science and established political power,but there was never a consensus on what constitutes new political science beyondits critical stance toward the existing discipline and its agreement that politicalscience, as an academic discipline, should be committed to advancing progressivepolitical action in the United States and abroad.

Political Science As Behavioralism

The behavioral revolution was advanced in the United States under the aegis ofsystems analysis and pluralist theory.4 Talcott Parsons, who brought systemsanalysis into the social sciences identified “the political system” with individualand collective behaviors that provide a center of integration for all aspects of thesocial system.5 David Easton, who played a major role in initiating the

3 Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.), Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 1, 9. Also see Robert Salisbury, “CurrentCriticism of APSA is Nothing New,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34 (December 2001),p. 767, and Theodore Lowi, “Every Poet His Own Aristotle,” in Monroe, op. cit., pp. 45–52,on the parallels between the new political science revolt and the Perestroika rebellion. JohnS. Dryzek, “Revolutions without Enemies: Key Transformations in Political Science,”American Political Science Review 100:4 (November 2006), p. 491, observes that “many of theyounger members of the Perestroika e-mail list in the early 2000s were apparently unawareof this last attempted reformation of the discipline, and needed reminding that once therewas the Caucus, and indeed that it lived still.”

4 For a sampling of the behavioralist literature at the time see David Easton,The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1953); David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1965); David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1965); Heinz Eulau, Samuel J. Eldersveld, and Morris Janowitz (eds), PoliticalBehavior: A Reader in Theory and Research (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956); S. Sidney Ulmer(ed.), Introductory Readings in Political Behavior (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961); JamesC. Charlesworth (ed.), The Limits of Behavioralism in Political Science (Philadelphia: AmericanAcademy of Political Social Science, 1962); Austin Ranney (ed.), Essays on the BehavioralStudy of Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1962); Heinz Eulau, The BehavioralPersuasion in Politics (New York: Random House, 1963).

5 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, IL: Free Press), pp. 75, 126–127, states thatpolitical science “is concerned with the power relations within the institutional system andwith a broader aspect of settlement of terms. . . . Neither power in the political sense nor theoperation of government as a sub-system of the social system can be treated in terms of aspecifically specialized conceptual scheme . . . precisely for the reason that the politicalproblem of the social system is a focus for the integration of all of its analyticallydistinguishable components, not of a specifically differentiated class of these components.Political science thus tends to be a synthetic science, not one built about an analytical theoryas is the case with economics.”

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behavioral revolution in political science, rejected the fundamental concepts ofearlier political scientists by declaring that “neither the state nor power is aconcept that serves to bring together political research.” In urging politicalscientists to abandon the analysis of state and power, Easton proposed thatscholars study the political system, which was defined as “those interactionsthrough which values are authoritatively allocated for a society.”6 Such ananalysis would focus on decision-making (i.e. authoritative allocations of values)and how these authoritative allocations facilitate the equilibrium of the overallsocial system.

Behavioralism and systems analysis became closely intertwined with pluralisttheory, which views decision-making as the outcome of bargaining and conflictbetween interest groups in society.7 The significance of pluralist theory is that itseemed to explain how political systems could induce most citizens to acceptdecisions as authoritative (i.e. legitimate) most of the time. Robert A. Dahl, whowas certainly the single most important proponent of pluralist theory, notes thatthe theory assumes:

that there are a number of loci for arriving at political decisions . . . business men,trade unions, politicians, consumers, farmers, voters and many other aggregates allhave an impact on policy outcomes; that none of these aggregates is homogeneousfor all purposes; that each of them is highly influential over some scopes but weakover many others; and that the power to reject undesired alternatives is morecommon than the power to dominate over outcomes directly.8

Importantly, pluralists asserted these political conditions prevail because keyresources, such as wealth, force, status, and knowledge are, if not equallydistributed, at least widely diffused among a plurality of competing groups insociety. This purported pattern of “dispersed inequalities” means that no onegroup controls a disproportionate share of all key resources, while all groups insociety possess some key resources. This pattern of dispersed inequalities insuresthat no one group dominates the political process (i.e. authoritative decision-making), while no group is completely powerless within that process. In the viewof many pluralist scholars, journalists, and public officials, the Western consensuson pluralist democracy and managed capitalism—namely, the Keynesian welfare

6 Easton, The Political System, op. cit., p. 106.7 For example, David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1953). For an analysis of this relationship see James Petras, “Ideology and United StatesPolitical Scientists,” in Charles A. McCoy and John Playford (eds), Apolitical Politics:A Critique of Behavioralism (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967), pp. 76–98. Easton,A Framework for Political Analysis, op. cit., p. 22, articulates the relationship in the followingway: “The behavioral approach testifies to the coming of age of theory in the social sciencesas a whole, wedded, however, to a commitment to the assumptions and methods ofempirical science. Unlike the great traditional theories of past political thought, new theorytends to be analytic, not substantive, explanatory rather than ethical, more general and lessparticular. That portion of political research which shares these commitments to both thenew theory and the technical means of analysis and verification thereby links politicalscience to broader behavioral tendencies in the social sciences; hence its description aspolitical behavior.”

8 Robert A. Dahl, Social Science Research on Business: Product and Potential (New York:Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 36.

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state—was so complete that democratic politics had reached “the end ofideology.”9

The Idea of a New Political Science

However, the worldwide political upheavals of 1968 called into question thedominant assumptions of academic social science at precisely the moment whenbehavioralists were celebrating their triumph at meetings of the social sciencedisciplinary associations. The idea that Western political systems had achievedsystem equilibrium through pluralist democracy and managed capitalism literallywent up in smoke on university campuses and in the streets of those verycountries.10 In the wake of historical political events that overtly contravened thefundamental assumptions of systems analysis and pluralist theory, as well as theobjectivist ideals of the behavioral revolution, the political science discipline wasbeing unmasked as establishment ideology, rather than autonomous science.11

The CNPS was established at the 1967 meeting of the APSA amidst theescalating political turmoil in the United States and abroad. The CNPS wasinitially the brainchild of H. Mark Roelofs, a professor of political science atNew York University, and Christian Bay, a professor of political science at theUniversity of Alberta. Christian Bay was best known for his book The Structure ofFreedom (1958), which was so highly regarded by political scientists that it wasreprinted in 1965 (with a new preface) and again in 1970. Bay authored one of theearliest critiques of the behavioral persuasion, particularly as manifested insystems analysis.12 Bay argued that the objective of political science and politicalsociology should not be to identify the functional needs of social systems, but toidentify and promote “the uses of social science for libertarian aims.”13 Thus, hiscritique of systems analysis contained a barely concealed criticism of politicalscientists and sociologists, who elevated the abstract needs of existing social andpolitical systems above the needs of actually existing persons.

Bay made this critique explicit in a controversial article published in theAmerican Political Science Review, entitled “Politics and Pseudopolitics,” whichdocumented in meticulous detail how “much of the current work on politicalbehavior generally fails to articulate its very real value biases, and that the politicalimpact of this supposedly neutral literature is generally conservative and in aspecial sense anti-political.”14 This theme was subsequently developed at greater

9 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). McCoy and Playford, op. cit., p. 10, suggest that by the mid-1960s it would “not be unwarranted to speak of the behavioralists as members of an‘establishment’ within the discipline.” Indeed, Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis,op. cit., pp. 4, 20, declares the “behavioral revolution” a fait accompli and refers to itspractitioners as a “concrete academic movement” within political science.

10 Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970);Alain Touraine, The May Movement (New York: Random House, 1971); Nigel Young, AnInfantile Disorder? The Crisis and Decline of the New Left (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).

11 William E. Connolly, Political Science and Ideology (New York: Atherton Press, 1967).12 Christian Bay, The Structure of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), ch. 5.13 Christian Bay, “Preface to the 1965 Printing,” in The Structure of Freedom (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1970), p. ix.14 Christian Bay, “Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical Evaluation of Some Behavioral

Literature,” American Political Science Review 54:1 (March 1965), p. 39.

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length in a book edited by Charles A. McCoy (Lehigh University) and JohnPlayford (Monash University), entitled Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavior-alism (1967), which pulled together several previously published essays byChristian Bay, James Petras, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Todd Gitlin,Steven Lukes, and others. The book’s critique of behavioral methodology andpluralist theory became an intellectual rallying point for members of the CNPS,who embraced the book as an early manifesto of the new political science.15

Apolitical Politics was not the first book to point out the methodological limitsof behavioralism,16 nor was it the first to question the behavioralist ideal of avalue-free political science.17 Yet, in contrast to the new political scientists, whoidentified inherent conceptual and methodological limitations to behavioralism,mainstream behavioralists were convinced that there were no “‘natural limits’ tothe behavioral analysis of politics.” Heinz Eulau, for example, declared that theonly limits to the application of behavioral methodology were “technologicalones” and that “as technology advances, the range of phenomena amenable toscientific analysis also expands.”18

At the other extreme, however, were political philosophers, especially LeoStrauss and his followers, who simply dismissed behavioralism. Indeed, one ofthe most influential early critiques of behavioralism by political philosophers wasa collection of essays, edited by Herbert J. Storing, entitled Essays on the ScientificStudy of Politics (1962). This Straussian critique of the behavioral revolutioncreated a stir in the APSR by asserting the Straussian axiom that “political scienceis identical with political philosophy,”19 and therefore, as Storing concluded, thebehavioralists’ focus on “how to study politics succeeds only in diverting us fromthe study of it.”20 As behavioralists tightened their stranglehold on the disciplinethrough control of the APSA’s official positions, the APSR editorial board, andSocial Science Research Council (SSRC) grants, they could easily ignore suchcriticism as sour grapes.

However, for both intellectual and political reasons, the critiques in ApoliticalPolitics could not be dismissed so easily by the academic establishment. WhileStrauss castigated American political scientists for their commitment to “liberaldemocracy”—one that was shared by most behavioralists—McCoy and Playforddescribed their book “as a ‘liberal’ critique of behavioralism’s conservative

15 John Ehrenberg, “Commentary: History of the Caucus for a New Political Science,”New Political Science 21: 3 (Fall 1999), p. 418.

16 For example, Charlesworth, op. cit.17 For example, Alfred Cobban, “The Decline of Political Theory,” Political Science

Quarterly 68:3 (September 1953), pp. 321–337; Herbert J. Storing (ed.), Essays on the ScientificStudy of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962).

18 Eulau, op. cit., p. 32.19 Leo Strauss, “An Epilogue,” in Storing, op. cit., pp. 308–309.20 Storing, op. cit., p. v. It is an ironic twist that the Straussians used the term “new

political science” when referring to behavioralism, because it was comparatively new inrelation to political philosophy, but they also sought to link behavioralism to itsphilosophical origins in Thomas Hobbes’s “new science of politics.” Christian Bay is theonly person among the CNPS’s founders who was aware of this irony in his writings, and itmay be that the CNPS was so named as an effort to recapture the heritage of Merriam,Lasswell, and Key. At the height of the CNPS struggle within the APSA, Bay declared, “I stillconsider myself a behavioralist.” Bay, “Preface to the 1970 Printing,” in The Structure ofFreedom, op. cit., p. v.


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ideological assumptions.”21 Hence, the normative basis of the new politicalscience was a commitment to liberal and democratic values that were well withinthe American academic and popular mainstream.

Similarly, the contributors to Apolitical Politics did not reject the scientific studyof politics, as did the Straussians, but agreed with behavioralists that Americanpolitical scientists had “been unduly preoccupied with the philosophic, legalistic,or descriptive treatment of political institutions.”22 The contributors to ApoliticalPolitics agreed that behavioralism had a great deal to contribute to political sciencethrough its rigorous application of scientific method, its insistence on theimportance of theory-building, and its willingness to draw on the findings of otherdisciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and economics. However, they alsopointed out that the contemporary generation of behavioralists had becomemethodological extremists, who made unsupportable claims that went far beyondthose made by behavioralism’s founders, such as Charles Merriam, V. O. Key, andHarold Lasswell.23 The contemporary generation of behavioralists, whileinvoking these names, systematically ignored the caveats of those same scholars,particularly their explicit normative commitment to improving democracy.24

Consequently, Christian Bay decried the current state of political science asmaking:

no sense at all, with neo-Aristotelian philosophers [i.e. Straussians] disdainful ofempirical inquiry on one side of the gulf, confronted with logical positivistbehavioralists who shy away from any and all normative commitments on the otherside. To make matters worse, communications across the chasm at times suggest theexistence of two enemy camps, not two kinds of scholars with complementarycontributions to make toward a common objective.25

The essays in Apolitical Politics developed a systematic critique ofbehavioralism that focused on three major concerns, which were collectivelydesignated “the behavioral syndrome.”26 First, behavioral studies wereideologically “conservative” in the sense that they implicitly, and sometimesexplicitly, celebrated the American economic, social, and political status quo. This

21 McCoy and Playford, op. cit., p. 10.22 Ibid., p. 3. In 1965, Bay, “Preface to the 1965 Printing,” op. cit., pp. ix–x, criticized the

Straussians, who were “the most vocal among the contemporary critics of the New Scienceof Politics, neo-Aristotelian by persuasion” for having “failed to produce any viablealternative approach” to behavioralism. He notes that an unfortunate result of theStraussians’ critique of behavioralism was that “political philosophy (in the now widelyaccepted sense in which Lasswell distinguishes this discipline from that of political science)lately by default has become the almost exclusive domain of a neo-Aristotelian breed ofpolitical scientists which has no use at all for such facts as the behavioralists produce!”

23 Connolly, op. cit., p. 5, states: “We accept, in short, the scientific ideal of politicalinquiry.” Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe (eds), An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers(New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 4, also note that “many members of the CNPS employedbehavioral techniques and considered themselves ‘behavioralists’.”

24 Charles E. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1925); Harold D. Lasswell, “The Policy Orientation,” in Daniel Lerner and HaroldD. Lasswell (eds), The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1951), pp. 3–15.

25 Bay, “Preface to the 1970 Printing,” op. cit., p. xvi.26 McCoy and Playford, op. cit., p. 10.

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line of thinking was explicitly influenced by C. Wright Mills, who in 1959 hadcalled attention to “the unexamined conservatism and scientific pretensions ofThe Behavioral Scientists.”27 This observation inspired new political scientists toexpose those hidden assumptions through detailed analyses of behavioralistwritings. In its claim to be apolitical, behavioralism was profoundly implicated inpolitics by providing an ideological defense of the existing order.

Second, behavioral scholarship consistently conveyed an explicit fear ofpopular democracy by rationalizing the non-participation of non-elites in thedecision-making process and even justified widespread non-voting as necessaryto the maintenance of system equilibrium.28 Third, behavioral scholarshipemphasized arcane methodological principles and elaborate data collectiontechniques, while avoiding vital political issues, such as racial and genderinequality, labor strife, poverty, and the sources of imperial warfare.29 In thisrespect, the behavioralists were apolitical, as even V. O. Key had recognized inpointing out that “a considerable proportion of the literature commonly classifiedunder the heading ‘political behavior’ has no real bearing on politics, or at leastthat its relevance has not been made apparent.”30 The behavioralists routinelyselected research topics not on the basis of political significance, but on criteriadetermined by their methodology and particularly on whether a “rich data base”was available that would allow for the use of ever more sophisticatedquantitative techniques. Behavioralists had become prisoners of a methodologythat led to work which was increasingly sophisticated in its use of newtechnologies and statistical techniques, while simultaneously becoming more“trivial, narrow, and apolitical” in the way it avoided contemporary socialproblems.31

Although the focus of Apolitical Politics was a philosophical critique ofbehavioralist methodology, it also included several essays that exemplified theempirical and conceptual limitations of that methodology as it had beenoperationalized in the pluralists’ community power research.32 Shin’ya Ono, inan essay on “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism,” defended Mills’s The Power Elite

27 C. Wright Mills, People, Power, and Politics: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills(New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), p. 226.

28 Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Boston: Little, Brown, &Co., 1967); McCoy and Playford, op. cit., p. 6. The philosopher Robert Paul Wolff (ed.),Political Man and Social Man (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 10, chastisedbehavioralists for their willingness to state “in forthright terms that political apathy is aGood Thing!” because they considered voter apathy a source of political stability or systemequilibrium.

29 McCoy and Playford, op. cit., p. 3. While modern political science had its genesis inthe reform politics of the Progressive Era, Dwight Waldo, Political Science in the United States:A Trend (Paris: UNESCO, 1956), p. 17, conducted an attitudinal survey of American politicalscientists in the 1950s and found that “the political order has been ‘accepted’, anddistinctive American ‘political theory’ has tended to be concerned with means andmethodology.”

30 V. O. Key, Jr., “The Politically Relevant in Surveys,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 24:1(Spring 1960), p. 54.

31 McCoy and Playford, op. cit., p. 7.32 Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 1961); Nelson Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); Arnold Rose, The Power Structure (New York:Oxford University Press, 1967).


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as “the most forceful criticism of the pluralist model of the power structure.”33 Atthe same time, Ono argued that the new political scientists should meet Dahl’schallenge to conduct additional empirical research to more precisely map thestructure of the power elite.34 In fact, G. William Domhoff and Ralph Milibandwere already implementing this empirical research agenda.35

Apolitical Politics also reprinted Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz’s essay onthe “Two Faces of Power,” which suggests that a fundamental limitation of thebehavioral concept of power is its assumption that “power is totally embodiedand fully reflected in ‘concrete decisions’ or in activity bearing directly upon theirmaking.”36 Bachrach and Baratz drew on E. E. Schattschneider’s concept of“mobilization of bias” to argue that political systems mobilize bias in the form ofdominant values, cultural symbols, political myths and rituals, and institutionalprocesses.37 The mobilization of bias in a political system inherently facilitates theorganization of some issues into politics, while organizing other issues out ofpolitics.38 By ignoring these selective mechanisms, pluralists begged the questionof power by taking the “key issues” decided by elected officials as given, when thetheoretically more important form of power was non-decision-making, i.e. theability to keep issues off the political agenda.39

33 Shin’ya Ono, “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism,” in McCoy and Playford (eds),op. cit., p. 105.

34 Robert A. Dahl, “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model,” American Political ScienceReview 52:1 (March 1958), pp. 463–469.

35 G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967);G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York: VintageBooks, 1970); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society: An Analysis of the Western Systemof Power (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

36 Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political ScienceReview 56:4 (December 1962), p. 948.

37 E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, Rinehart, andWinston, 1960).

38 The irony is that Dahl understood the mobilization of bias well before he conductedhis empirical research in New Haven. For example, Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to DemocraticTheory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 137, states that a basic proposition ofdemocratic theory is that “Constitutional rules are mainly significant because they help todetermine what particular groups are to be given advantages or handicaps in the politicalstruggle. In no society do people ever enter a political contest equally; the effect of theconstitutional rules is to preserve, add to, or subtract from the advantages and handicapswith which they start the race. . . . constitutional rules . . . are crucial to the status andpower of the particular groups who gain or suffer by the operation.” However, what Dahlclaimed to verify in Who Governs? had already been assumed as an ideological propositionin A Preface to Democratic Theory, p. 137, namely, that “a central guiding thread of Americanconstitutional development has been the evolution of a political system in which all theactive and legitimate groups in the population can make themselves heard at some crucialstage in the process of decision.”

39 While they fail to acknowledge it, Bachrach and Baratz’s concept of non-decisions isalready advanced in C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1956), p. 4, where he observes: “Whether they [the power elite] do or do not make suchdecisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions; theirfailure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greaterconsequence than the decisions they do make.”

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The Idea As Organization

The new political science was putting forward a methodological critique ofbehavioralism, while proposing a critical and empirical research agenda with thepotential to yield results that would have normative implications substantiallydifferent from those of the apolitical behavioralists. However, the idea of a newpolitical science almost instantaneously became an organizational struggle withinthe APSA. The spark which ignited the Caucus was the official rejection andtabling of several resolutions introduced at the September 6, 1967 businessmeeting of the APSA in Chicago. The most contentious of the resolutions involvedArticle II of the APSA constitution, which states that the association “will notcommit its members on questions of public policy nor take positions notimmediately concerned with its direct purpose,” which is “to encourage the studyof Political Science.” Article II was invoked by APSA officers to block theintroduction of various “political” resolutions asking the APSA to take positionson contemporary public policy issues, such as the Vietnam War. The conflict washeightened by a favorable vote on an interim report addressing the ethicalproblems confronted by academic political scientists in conducting research.40

Christian Bay castigated the report for managing “to bring up almost everyconceivable ethical issue but the ones at hand, and to conclude with wholly non-committal recommendations.” Moreover, business meeting attendees were upsetthat microphones had been placed on the officers’ podium so that APSA officerscould address the audience, but no microphones were made available to theaudience for purposes of public discussion and deliberation. Bay decried themeeting as one that “bordered on the grotesque.”41

The Caucus for a New Political Science coalesced over the next 36 hours as a“spontaneous and wholly unpremeditated” reaction to the business meeting.42

The Caucus was organized in a series of three meetings, each double the size of thepreceding meeting, which culminated with the election of a 13-member executivecommittee, the adoption of an official name, and a membership list ofapproximately 225 persons. H. Mark Roelofs was elected chairman; CharlesA. McCoy, vice-chairman; Paul Minkoff (Brooklyn College), treasurer; and AnnaNavarro (Princeton University), secretary.43

The Caucus passed several resolutions, including one that asked the APSAProgram Committee to devote a full day of the 1968 convention to a discussion ofthe Vietnam War, a second resolution asking the APSA to poll the association’s fullmembership on their attitudes toward the war, and a third resolution calling onthe APSA to resist efforts by the House Un-American Affairs Committee to obtain

40 American Political Science Association, “Final Report of the American PoliticalScience Association, Committee on Professional Standards and Responsibilities: EthicalProblems of Academic Political Scientists,” PS 1:3 (Summer 1968), pp. 3–29.

41 Christian Bay, “Communications: To the Editor,” American Political Science Review 61:4(December 1967), p. 1096.

42 H. Mark Roelofs, “Communications: To the Editor,” PS 1:1 (Winter 1968), p. 38.43 Ibid., p. 40. Other members of the original executive committee were Ronald Bayer

(University of Chicago), Tom Blau (University of Chicago), Alex Gottfried (University ofWashington), Edward C. Hayes (University of California, Berkeley), Sanford V. Levinson(Harvard University), Alden E. Lind (University of North Carolina), David Morris(Institute for Policy Studies), and Marvin Surkin (Moravian College).


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membership lists of campus organizations.44 These overtures were all rejected bythe APSA officialdom, although it was agreed that more papers and panels wouldbe devoted to the Vietnam War the next year. However, the so-called Resolution 1and Resolution 5 were considered “the major resolutions” of the 1967 convention,because they established the purpose and mission of the CNPS:

RESOLUTION 1

Whereas the American Political Science Association, at its conventions and in itsjournal, has consistently failed to study, in a radically critical spirit, either the greatcrises of the day or the inherent weaknesses of the American political system, be itresolved that this caucus promote a new concern in the Association for our greatsocial crises and a new and broader opportunity for us all to fulfill, as scholars, ourobligations to society and to science.

RESOLUTION 5

Be it resolved that one of the primary concerns of the Caucus be to stimulateresearch in areas of political science that are of crucial importance and that havebeen thus far ignored.45

Christian Bay went on to suggest that “if the APSA cannot be moved” it mightbe necessary to create a “new Society for the Study of Political Problems, for thoseof us who want to get out from under the wings of our own establishment.”46

At the same time, the CNPS executive committee “stressed that the Caucus for aNew Political Science is a group within the Association” so it is worth noting thatChristian Bay was not among the original officers of the CNPS nor a member of itsfirst executive committee.47 Indeed, while Christian Bay proposed a resolutionfor the 1968 APSA convention to rescind Article II outright,48 the CNPS executivecommittee proposed a resolution that would merely amend Article II to allow theAssociation to actively encourage “in its membership and in its journal, researchin and concern for significant contemporary political and social problems,however controversial and subject to partisan discourse in the community at largethese may be.”49

In the spirit of a loyal opposition, the CNPS made plans for a series of panels atthe 1968 APSA convention that would deal with topics such as the 1968 electionsand whether they offered meaningful choices; race, power, and money; thecreation of “news”; Vietnam and American foreign policy; and new modes ofradical political thought and action in the United States. While fully consistentwith the CNPS’s purpose and mission, the leadership emphasized that thesepanels were “designed to supplement” the APSA program and “to expand it in the

44 Ibid., p. 3945 Quoted in Ibid., p. 39.46 Bay, “Communications,” op. cit., p. 1096.47 Roelofs, op. cit., p. 39.48 Christian Bay, “For an American Political Science Association,” PS 1:1 (Summer

1968), pp. 36–38.49 Quoted in Roelofs, op. cit., p. 39.

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direction of greater relevance to the political problems of the day.” The Caucus’spanels were “in no way supposed to conflict with or hamper the program plannedby the regular committees of the Association.”50

However, as John Dryzek points out, “Resistance from the now mostlybehavioralist APSA hierarchy could be fierce.”51 The APSA’s officers agreed tostart publishing PS as a forum for discussing issues within the discipline, but thepanels proposed by the Caucus were excluded from the official program. In 1968,not even one panel at the APSA annual meeting dealt with the Vietnam War orother controversial issues such as the urban riots.52 Consequently, the Caucusorganized its own program around the theme of “American Democracy in Crisis.”It sponsored panels on race and the urban riots and the 1968 rebellions in Chicago,Czechoslovakia, and Columbia University. The Caucus panels had such largeturnouts that Caucus organizers were more convinced than ever that “manypolitical scientists were ready to move in the direction initiated by the CNPS.”53

The second APSA convention with a Caucus presence ended with the CNPSmembership list more than doubling to over 500 persons—about 14% of the 3,723persons attending the conference, but only 4% of total APSA membership.54

The Caucus instructed its new 21-member executive committee to set upstudy commissions on the role of non-whites and women in the profession,graduate education, conference programming, and to investigate the possibility ofpublishing its own journal.55

The following year, the APSA leadership adopted a more conciliatory stance.The APSA’s executive director, Evron M. Kirkpatrick, began distributing theAssociation’s annual report to the entire membership for the first time in 1969,including information on membership and conference participation. DavidEaston, the newly elected president of the APSA, also agreed to allow someCaucus panels as part of the official program beginning with the 1969 APSAconvention. However, no one was prepared for Easton, the high priest of thebehavioral revolution in political science, to echo many of the concerns expressed

50 Ibid., p. 39.51 Dryzek, op. cit., p. 491.52 Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 417.53 Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe, “The Political Dimension of American Political

Science,” Acta Politica (October 1969), p. 44.54 Evron Kirkpatrick, “Report of the Executive Director, 1968-69,” PS 2, special

supplement (Summer 1969), pp. 483, 530.55 Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension,” op. cit., p. 45. Helene Silverberg,

“Gender Studies and Political Science: The History of the ‘Behavioralist Compromise’,”in James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (eds), Discipline and History: Political Science in theUnited States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 368, observes that inthe late 1960s women began entering political science graduate programs in substantialnumbers and “they formed part of a growing constituency available for mobilizationagainst the established structure of the postwar profession.” A group of these womenjoined the CNPS insurgency and the Caucus attempted to attract women to its ranks bycreating its own Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, chaired (ironically)by (a male) Alan Wolfe. David Easton responded by appointing an APSA Committee on theStatus of Women, but neither vehicle was deemed suitable for advancing women’s issues inthe profession, which led a small group to found the Women’s Caucus for Political Science.Like the CNPS, the WCPS sought to promote both intellectual and organizational changewithin the APSA. A Black Caucus was organized almost simultaneously with the other twocaucuses.


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by the Caucus in his presidential address. At the 1969 convention, Easton declaredthat:

A new revolution is under way in American political science. The last revolution –behavioralism – has scarcely been completed before it has been overtaken by theincreasing social and political crises of our time. The weight of these crises is beingfelt within our discipline in the form of a new conflict in the throes of which we nowfind ourselves. This new and latent challenge is directed against a developingbehavioral orthodoxy. . . . The initial impulse of this revolution is just being felt. Itsbattle cries are relevance and action.56

The new Caucus was gaining steam and its members were not mollified byEaston’s gesture. In the same year, Alan Wolfe, a young Caucus firebrand, whowas a student of Theodore J. Lowi, published an article documenting the APSA’s“oligarchic yet apolitical character.”57 He applied the same method of powerstructure analysis deployed in radical critiques of pluralism to map out theAPSA’s internal power structure and hold it up as an example of the discipline’sapolitical politics. Not a single Association office had ever been contested byanyone from outside this academic establishment.

Wolfe argued that conference panels were not enough and that the Caucusneeded to run its own slate of candidates for APSA offices “as a way ofdemonstrating alternative approaches to the discipline.”58 Wolfe and many ofhis young colleagues insisted that a new political science “demanded bothintellectual and organizational reform” and that democracy should be extended“to the APSA where contested elections were unknown.”59 The CNPS ran afull slate of candidates in 1969, and for the first time in APSA history there was anorganized challenge to the nominees of the official Nominating Committee, whichhistorically had put forward only one name for each APSA office.

The CNPS nominated Christian Bay for president. It nominated David Kettler,H. Mark Roelofs, and Alan Wolfe for the three vice-presidential positions. HenryS. Kariel and Lewis Lipsitz, among others, were nominated for the APSAExecutive Council (see Table 1). Kariel and Lipsitz were also nominated by theAPSA Nominating Committee, which led to the formation of a third group in the1969 election called the Ad Hoc Committee for a Representative Slate. The Ad HocCommittee was chaired by Donald G. Herzberg of the Eagleton Institute.

As a result of this unprecedented situation, it was decided at the annual meetingto conduct the election by mail and to engage the American Arbitration Associationto administer the election. The ballots were mailed to the Association’s 13,061members with statements of belief and biographies for each of the candidates.60

However, before the ballots arrived at members’ offices, Herzberg sent a letter toevery APSA member on behalf of the Ad Hoc Committee asking them to cast

56 David Easton, “The New Revolution in Political Science,” American Political ScienceReview 63:4 (December 1969), p. 1051.

57 Alan Wolfe, “Practising the Pluralism We Preach: Internal Processes in the AmericanPolitical Science Association,” Antioch Review 29 (Fall 1969), p. 354.

58 Alan Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” in Surkin and Wolfe, An End to PoliticalScience, op. cit., p. 292.

59 Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., p. 5.60 John E. Mueller, “The Political Scientist Decides: An Examination of the 1969 APSA

Ballots,” PS 3:3 (Summer 1970), p. 311.

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61 Donald G. Herzberg, “To the Editor,” PS 2:4 (Autumn 1969), p. 704.62 James W. Prothro, “To the Editor,” PS 2:4 (Autumn 1969), pp. 702–703.63 American Arbitration Association, “1970 APSA Election Results,” PS 4:1 (Winter

1971), p. 49; Charles L. Taylor and Gordon Tullock, “The 1970 APSA Elections,” PS 4:3(Summer 1971), p. 354.

Table 1. 1969 American Political Science Association Election

1969 American Political Science Association Election

President Endorsement Votes Percent

Robert E. Lane* PS AH 5,198 66Christian Bay C 2,609 33

Vice-PresidentGrant McConnell* PS AH 5,336 68William Riker* PS AH 5,259 67Robert E. Ward* PS AH 4,932 63David Kettler C 2,412 31H. Mark Roelofs C 2,383 30Alan Wolfe C 2,370 30

SecretaryThomas Dye* PS AH 5,415 69Minkoff C 2,235 28

TreasurerRourke* PS AH 5,213 66Clarke C 2,489 32

Council – 2 Yr. TermPrestage C PS AH BC 5,852 74Samuel Huntington* PS AH 5,400 69Salisbury* PS AH 5,067 64Herbert McClosky* AH 5,050 64Kessel* PS AH 4,819 61Alan Sindler* AH 4,726 60Waldron* PS AH 4,224 54Henry S. Kariel* C PS 3,671 47Lewis Lipsitz C PS 3,625 46Elden 2,910 37Becker C 2,696 33William E. Connolly C 2,569 33Greene C 2,501 32Alex Gottfried C 2,427 31

Council – 1 Yr. TermJohnson* C AH BC 6,257 80

Notes: C – Caucus for a New Political SciencePS – Nominating Committee of the APSAAH – Ad Hoc Committee for a Representative SlateBC – Black Caucus*Elected

Source: Mueller (1970, 312).


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Executive Council votes for Herbert McCloskey (University of California, Berkeley)and Alan Sindler (Cornell University) instead of Henry Kariel and Lewis Lipsitz.Herzberg argued that it was only after the Nominating Committee had endorsedKariel and Lipsitz that the two pledged “to serve in the Association asrepresentatives of the Caucus.” McCloskey and Sindler were held up as “scholarsof high competence and achievement,” while Kariel and Lipsitz, despite their ownscholarly accomplishments, were denounced as “Members of the ExecutiveCommittee of the Caucus for a New Political Science.” In contrast to the Caucus,which “advocates the full-scale politicization of the Association and the use of itsresources to advance a political action program,” the Ad Hoc Committee wanted“to maintain the Association as a non-partisan professional organization devotedto shared professional purposes.” It was their view that “this election willdetermine whether the Association is to be a professional organization based onshared interests and expertise in scholarship, research, and teaching or whether it isto become a political action group.”61

The Herzberg letter provoked a response from James Prothro (University ofNorth Carolina), who sent a letter to political science departments in Octoberof 1969 “to defend the professional reputations of Lewis Lipsitz (University ofNorth Carolina) and Henry Kariel (University of Hawaii).” Prothro informedreaders that the “Nominating Committee knew the Caucus intended to offernominations for the Council and was obviously aware that Lipsitz and Karielmight well receive the nomination of the Caucus . . . Lipsitz andKariel were nominated as competent political scientists first and not as‘ambassadors’ of the Caucus.” The irony was not lost on him that a group whoclaimed to oppose the politicization of the APSA “has the same effect . . . asthe kind of last minute smear tactic associated with the dirtiest level of wardpolitics.”62

In the end, Christian Bay won 33% of the vote for president, while RobertE. Lane won the election with 66%. The Caucus’s candidates for vice-president,secretary, and treasurer lost by similar margins. Kariel was elected to theExecutive Council, but the Ad Hoc Committee was successful in electingMcCloskey and Sindler, which was sufficient to keep Lipsitz off the council (seeTable 1). The following year, the CNPS nominated Hans Morgenthau, whoopposed the Vietnam War, as its candidate for APSA president. Morgenthaucaptured 43% of the votes cast in 1970.63

In response, the APSA Nominating Committee endorsed Christian Bay for theExecutive Council the following year and with official support he was the onlyCNPS nominee to win a position in that election. Moreover, after three consecutive

64 Mueller, op. cit.; Taylor and Tullock, op. cit.; Bernard Grofman, “The 1971 APSAElections,” PS 5:3 (Summer 1972), pp. 278–289.

65 Grofman, op. cit., p. 283. PS also published the results of a rather weak mail survey(n ¼ 176) of political scientists in the Mountain West (i.e. Arizona, Colorado, Idaho,Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), which found “that behavioralismhas far more adherents with the profession than does post-behavioralism. . . . Thepopularity of post-behavioralism also seems to vary with field of specialization in politicalscience. It is particularly strong among the Political Theorists.” See Kendall L. Baker, SamiG. Hajjar, and Alan Evan Schenker, “A Note on Behavioralists and Post-Behavioralists inContemporary Political Science,” PS 5:3 (Summer 1972), pp. 271–272.

66 Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., p. 7.

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elections in what amounted to a new multi-party system, and which now includedendorsements by the newly formed Women’s Caucus, a veritable cottage industrysprang into being as behavioral political scientists put their tools to work analyzingvoting patterns in APSA elections. The studies found remarkably little straightticket voting among APSA members.64 Consequently, an analysis of the 1971election by Bernard Grofman concluded that, given existing voting patterns, CNPSnominees could never be elected unless they were simultaneously endorsed byeither the APSA Nominating Committee or the Ad Hoc Committee. Thus, headvised the political science establishment that “as long as the Ad Hoc Committeeand APSA combine forces, it would appear that the Caucus can be frozenout, except for such nominees as are ‘given’ it by the APSA NominatingCommittee.”65

The Organization as Radical Idea

In the midst of this organizational upheaval, new political science took a moreradical turn when the movement’s shifting leadership released a secondmanifesto, co-edited by Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe and entitled An End toPolitical Science: The Caucus Papers (1970). The book was a collection of essays bynewly prominent members of the CNPS, which proclaimed the end of politicalscience as it was currently taught and practiced in the United States. According tothe editors:

To change political science will require a critique of the current [behavioral-pluralist] paradigm and the development of alternative modes of research,theory, and social practice. . . . In short, because the only political sciencepermitted in America today is that defined and determined within the existingparadigm, and because only those “responsible” critics who are content toremain within the established pluralistic mold are tolerated, we conclude thatthe only option now available to critics and reformers is an end to politicalscience.66

In contrast to Apolitical Politics, the essays in The Caucus Papers were largelyauthored by newly minted assistant professors working at the periphery of the

67 Marvin Surkin, “Sense and Nonsense in Politics,” in Surkin and Wolfe, An End toPolitical Science, op. cit., p. 27. Surkin proposed “an alternative methodology for the socialsciences based on existential phenomenology the theoretical foundations of which areconsistent with the position that for a social scientist to be empirical is not to assume that hemust be value-free or nonideological. In fact, existential phenomenology is well suited tothe view that an empirical analysis of reality is not only a way of understanding the socialworld, but that it is also a way of criticizing society and of changing it as well.” Ibid., p. 15.

68 Michael Parenti, “Power and Pluralism: A View from the Bottom,” in Surkin andWolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., p. 137.

69 Ibid., p. 116.70 An important exception was Herbert Hirsch, Poverty and Politicization: Political

Socialization in an American Sub-Culture (New York: Free Press, 1970).


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academic establishment, such as Marvin Surkin, Alan Wolfe, Michael Parenti,Matthew Crenson, David Underhill, and James Petras (associate professor).Many of the chapters previewed a wave of forthcoming books that were highlycritical of the behavioral-pluralist paradigm and the political science disciplinegenerally. The Caucus Papers continued the critique of behavioral methodology,while deepening the critique of pluralist theory. It also extended that critique tothe political science profession as Caucus leadership shifted from older liberalsto younger radicals and as frustration and conflict intensified with the APSAestablishment. As opposed to the politely “liberal critique” advanced inApolitical Politics, The Caucus Papers advanced a radical critique consisting ofessays written primarily by self-proclaimed Marxists, socialists, and radicaldemocrats.

Caucus radicals took the earlier critique of behavioralism as given, so whilemany of these arguments were reiterated in various contexts, the latest manifestowas more interested in documenting that even though behavioralism claimed tobe an “empirical” methodology its application in pluralist studies actually“demonstrate behavioralism’s intellectual and political incapacity to cometo terms” with social and political reality.67 The Caucus Papers picked up whereApolitical Politics had left off, but its main targets were pluralist theory and theprofession of political science, rather than an epistemological and normativecritique of behavioralism.

The Critique of Pluralist Theory

New political scientists were now directing three types of critiques at thepluralists: immanent critiques, conceptual critiques, and the elaboration oftheoretical alternatives. Michael Parenti focused his attention on Robert Dahl’sWho Governs?, which he considered “the most intelligent and important pluraliststatement.”68 Parenti developed an immanent critique of this paradigmatic workto demonstrate that if it was subjected to a more searching analysis by critics, Dahl(and others) frequently went to great lengths to verbally obfuscate and suppresstheir own empirical findings, which were often at odds with their ideologicalassumptions. By unraveling the contradictions between ideological assumptionsand empirical fact, Parenti laid the foundation for a critique of power from

71 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions ofPublic Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); Richard A. Cloward and Frances FoxPiven, The Politics of Turmoil: Essays on Poverty, Race, and the Urban Crisis (New York:Pantheon Books, 1974); Michael Parenti, Power and the Powerless (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1978).

72 William E. Connolly (ed.), The Bias of Pluralism (New York: Atherton Press, 1969).73 Matthew A. Crenson, The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decisionmaking in

the Cities (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).74 Matthew A. Crenson, “Nonissues in City Politics: The Case of Air Pollution,”

in Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., pp. 144–145.75 See Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Decisions and Non-Decisions:

An Analytical Framework,” American Political Science Review 57:3 (September 1963),pp. 632–642.

76 Crenson, “Nonissues in City Politics,” op. cit., p. 148.77 Parenti, “Power and Pluralism,” op. cit., p. 113.

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below—namely, a concept of power developed from the point of view of theexcluded, the oppressed, and the marginalized in American society.

Parenti suggested that instead of declaring the lower classes to be an unknownbut contented entity, as the pluralists did, scholars should take “the simpleexpedient of directly investigating the less privileged elements of a community todetermine why they are not active, and what occurs when they do attempt tobecome active.”69 As Parenti pointed out, academic studies of policy strugglesinvolving lower-status groups were a rarity in American political science.70 Thus,he proposed that political scientists begin studying power “from the bottom up”as a way to correct the empirical shortcomings of pluralist theory.71

The immanent critique of pluralism raised numerous theoretical questionsabout pluralism’s conceptual and methodological limits. The most significantconceptual critiques involved efforts to operationalize the concepts of non-decision-making and pre-emption. Bachrach and Baratz’s 1962 article on“Two Faces of Power” had been republished in Apolitical Politics (1968) andin William E. Connolly’s The Bias of Pluralism (1969), which made the conceptof non-decision-making a standard article of faith for the new political science.72

However, in a preview of his forthcoming book, The Un-Politics of Air Pollution(1971), Matthew Crenson offered the first glimpse in The Caucus Papers of how onecould operationalize this concept empirically.73 Crenson suggested that more andmore political analysts were beginning to acknowledge that “there is something tobe learned from political inaction—from nonevents, nonissues, and nondecisions.”Crenson drew on comparative case studies of local air pollution policy, includingthe absence of policy, to illustrate how “the decision-making process [analyzed bypluralists] is one by which the winners of the political game are determined; non-decision-making helps determine what the game will be in the first place”.Crenson demonstrated in concrete detail how “the political issues that generatedata for pluralist studies of local politics are the ones that have managed to passthrough the filtering processes of non-decision-making.” However, the pluralistshad never attempted “to account for the seemingly important decisions that arenever made, or the seemingly critical issues that never arise.”74

Crenson’s work demonstrated that non-decisions were observable and often(though not always) involved a conscious decision to exclude or suppress apotential issue from the decision-making agenda.75 However, it was furtherhypothesized that many issues, and the groups affected by them, are excludedfrom the established decision-making process because of industry’s “reputationfor power” among political decision-makers.76 In his analysis of various publicpolicies, Parenti had also pointed to businessmen’s “powers of pre-emption” toillustrate a key shortcoming of behavioral methodology; namely, that pluralists

78 Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., p. 11.79 Parenti, “Power and Pluralism,” op. cit., p. 112.80 Henry Kariel, The Decline of American Pluralism (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1961); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1966).

81 Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969), p. 51;Theodore J. Lowi, “The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism,” American PoliticalScience Review 61:1 (March 1967), pp. 5–24.

82 Mills, The Power Elite, op. cit., p. 300.83 Domhoff, Who Rules America?, op. cit., p. 11.


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failed to acknowledge “that corporate leaders often have no need to involvethemselves in decision-making because sufficient anticipatory consideration isgiven to their interests by officeholders.”77

Thus, by 1969–1970, there was a growing sense of urgency among manynew political scientists that it was time to move beyond “anti-pluralism” andthe critique of behavioralism to a genuinely new political science. Surkin andWolfe suggested that members of the CNPS were increasingly convinced thatany effort to criticize and change the ideology of American society, and torestructure its institutions and social relations, would require “the developmentof new modes of radical political thought and action.”78 There were now“liberal” and “radical” theoretical alternatives competing to become the newpolitical science.

Parenti observed that a liberal group of “anti-pluralists” was raising troublingquestions about whether elites were mutually restrained by competitiveinteraction with other elites, as claimed by the theory of democratic elitism,or by pressure from the masses, as claimed by many pluralists.79 Henry S. Karieland Grant McConnell argued that case studies of interest-group influence over thepolicy process revealed that powerful interest groups did not compete againsteach other, but captured those sectors of the state and public policy that directlyaffected their special interest.80 This process of parceling out governmental powerto special interest groups meant that “pluralism” was incapable of achieving thepublic interest, because government decisions were controlled by private specialinterests for their own benefit. Special interest elites tended to predominate inparticular spheres of government policy. This strain of anti-pluralism waseventually identified with Theodore Lowi’s “interest group liberalism,” whichdescribes the actual functioning of interest groups in government as “a vulgarizedversion of the pluralist model.”81

A more radical strain of thought sought to document empirically that theUnited States has an upper class and that the national government is dominatedby a ruling class. Much of this work traced its origin to C. Wright Mills, whodismissed pluralist theory “as a set of images out of a fairy tale.”82 In contrastto the pluralist model of group competition and dispersed inequalities, Millsargued that a tightly knit coalition of the corporate rich, military warlords, and aservile political directorate—a power elite—governed the United States.

G. William Domhoff, a political sociologist, built on Mills’s observations, butalso went beyond his theoretical claims by documenting in meticulous detail howa small corporate elite’s “control of corporations, foundations, elite universities,the Presidency, the federal judiciary, the military, and the CIA qualifies theAmerican upper class as a ‘governing class’, especially in the light of the wealthowned and the income received by members of that exclusive social group.”83 In ashort time, however, power elite theory would morph into class analysis andMarxism with the publication of Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society(1969). As with Domhoff, the theoretical power of Miliband’s analysis was that it

84 Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., p. 169.85 James Petras, “Patterns of Intervention: U.S. Foreign Policy and Business in Latin

America,” in Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., pp. 186–214.86 David Kettler, “Beyond Republicanism: The Socialist Critique of Political Idealism,”

in Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, op. cit., p. 40.

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did not sidestep a direct confrontation with mainstream social science, butestablished the necessity for a new political science through an empirical critiqueof pluralism and systems theory. Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society(1969) was not only among the most important books to empirically challengepluralism during this time; at a theoretical level, it returned the concept of the stateto the vocabulary of American political science.

The radical turn in new political science also extended the critique of pluralismfrom domestic to foreign policy. In The Caucus Papers, Surkin and Wolfe insistedthat an analysis of American imperialism is “essential to an understanding of USpolicies.”84 Yet, the dominant ideology of pluralist democracy was runningrampant in the international relations subfield. James Petras contributed an essayto The Caucus Papers that suggested that the power structure of US imperialismoperated remarkably similar to the domestic power structure, since it emanatedfrom the same capitalist elite. Petras analyzed US relations with Latin America tofind that US foreign policy decisions were controlled by “linkage groups.”Linkage groups were networks of American investors, financiers, and businessexecutives linked to foreign military officers who had been trained in the UnitedStates and who often did business in or with the United States, while dependingon it for both economic and military support. At the same time, Americanbusiness was able to exert “indirect influence” on foreign governments through itsreputation for power and its real ability to withhold loans or credits or tomanipulate import quotas for one-crop export dependent nations.85

These works, and many others, established that a future new political sciencewould need to develop a theory of class structure, a theory of the state, and atheory of imperialism, although as others would soon point out, it also needed totheorize gender, race, ecology, and other forms of non-class identity and politicalaction. However, many in the CNPS were convinced that forward movement inpolitical science was blocked by the discipline’s organization. Networks ofacademic elites controlled access to teaching and research positions, and therewere even accusations that CNPS activists were blacklisted. The journals werecontrolled by a small group of behavioralists, and major grant awards andinternships were controlled by a behavioralist establishment linked financially,politically, and ideologically to corporate and political elites in the existing powerstructure. These concerns led to a new element in the new political science critiqueof the discipline, which involved not only Wolfe’s earlier dissection of theacademic establishment, but the realization that many of those same politicalscientists were integrated into the existing national power structure. David Kettlerconcluded that, whether consciously or unconsciously, political scientists “areamong the prime contributors to the dominant ideology” and thus function toreproduce a social and political order that fails to represent the interests ofordinary citizens.86

87 Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” p. 290.88 Ibid., p. 291.89 Ithiel de Sola Pool, “The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for

Governments,” Background 10 (August 1966), p. 111.


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Professionalism and the Power Structure

When the Ad Hoc Committee responded to the Caucus’s political activism insidethe APSA by claiming it wanted “to maintain the Association as a non-partisanprofessional organization devoted to shared professional purposes,” it linked theorganizational defense of behavioralism to the concept of professionalism. Therewere more than a few among the new political scientists who saw the long drift tobehavioralism and pluralism as being linked to the professionalization of politicalscience. Thus, the academic establishment’s response to the Caucus set off amultifaceted critique of professionalism.

Wolfe observes that the historical definition of a profession is “a group ofpeople whose expertise, fairness, and devotion were so unquestioned thatdecisions about who was to be admitted to the group could only be made by thegroup itself, privately, under special sanction from the state.” For the most part,clergy, lawyers, and doctors were the classic exemplars of the professions, witheach developing a system of apprenticeships and qualification tests formembership in the profession. However, an essential element of the professionsis an ethic of public service and, as Wolfe notes, their service to society wasconsidered so important “that only they should have the right to determine entry”into the profession.87

Political science claimed to be a profession, and opponents of the Caucusregarded political activity as unprofessional, whether inside the APSA, oncampus, or in the community. Yet the paradox of the behavioral revolution and itsattendant scientism is that the concept of professionalism in political science wasfused to the idea that “political science is a neutral, ‘pure’, science, not a body ofexpert and immediately applicable knowledge, like law or medicine.” Thus, asWolfe notes, “service to any clientele, an important part of the traditionalprofessions, is not a salient characteristic of the social sciences” and thus any overteffort to forge political linkages of this type were considered unprofessional.88

Official political scientists condemned political activity, or even political advocacy,as a violation of the profession’s code of scientific conduct.

The hypocrisy of the dominant view is that political scientists were providingservice to a specific clientele and to that extent were engaging in politics byserving the state and state elites. Ithiel de Sola Pool incurred the wrath of newpolitical scientists for forthrightly arguing that social scientists ought to train “thenew mandarins” of the twentieth century on grounds that “the only hope forhumane government in the future” is “the extensive use of the social sciences bygovernment.”89 While most Caucus members probably accepted this ideal inprinciple, they parted ways with de Sola Pool on his recommendation that to fullyrealize this humanizing role, social scientists should work for the CIA. Thus, whenmany of the profession’s top academic elites, including the APSA’s executivedirector, were actually discovered to have ties to the CIA, it was a shock thatstimulated the Caucus to undertake activities designed to recapture and redefine

90 Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension of American Political Science,” p. 55.91 Lewis Lipsitz, “Vulture, Mantis, and Seal: Proposals for Political Scientists,” in George

J. Graham, Jr. and George W. Carey (eds), The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on PoliticalScience (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1972), p. 173.

92 Surkin and Wolfe (eds), An End to Political Science, p. 4.93 Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” op. cit., p. 303.

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the nature of the profession or, more immediately, the professional association ofpolitical scientists.90

In this context, Lewis Lipsitz observed that:

Despite the impression the convention or the main professional journals might give,social scientists were involved in the making of significant political decisions –pacifying Vietnam; designing the bombing; creating the Diem regime; thinkingabout a “war” on poverty. Moreover, the political science profession as a whole gaveevidence in the main thrust of its work of a shamefully thoughtless endorsement ofthe American status quo; an endorsement built into the assumptions and oftenexplicit in the conclusions of much research.91

This phase of criticizing the profession, and sometimes its individualmembers, took the critique of Apolitical Politics a step further by offering concreteevidence that the purveyors of official ideology were not just well-intentioned, ifunconscious, purveyors of the status quo, but many had extensive financial,political, and ideological commitments to the existing power structure and wereintegrated into that power structure at multiple levels. Importantly, the CNPS didnot reject a role for political scientists in policy-making, nor offer in its stead anivory tower conception of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The newpolitical science proposed an equally ideologically driven critique of “theparticular uses of knowledge to which much of the profession was nowcommitted and the complacent—even positive—attitude adopted by manypolitical scientists toward these developments.” Thus, when the CNPS declaredpolitical science “irrelevant,” it was demanding that political science “serve theinterests of the poor and oppressed around the world,” rather than “the interestsof the U.S. government and the corporate establishment.”92

Organizational Revolt or Intellectual Revolution?

The growing dissatisfaction of CNPS members with both the discipline andprofession of political science finally led some to raise the fateful question of whatwas to be done. In The Caucus Papers, Wolfe reports that radical intellectuals inmany of the social sciences were pursuing two strategies that, while “initiallyessential,” had “now reached the point where at least in political science they arecounterproductive.”93 These strategies were intellectual muckraking within thedisciplines and organizational revolt within disciplinary associations.

In political science, muckraking included the numerous critiques ofbehavioralism and pluralism, the critiques of the APSA and the professionalmystique, and documenting the often subtle but still repressive limits to academicfreedom within the American university. Wolfe reports after two years ofmuckraking that “all of these activities . . . are fun. All of them, in addition, havebecome tiring.” Wolfe’s assessment of the current situation was that “there is onlyso much rationality within the universities and the academic professions,” so thatin the end rational arguments designed to point out the intellectual limitations of

94 Ibid.95 Ibid., p. 304.96 Ibid., p. 305.97 Ibid., p. 306.


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the discipline or political flaws in its professional organization will persuade onlya small number of people to join the Caucus—either intellectually or politically.94

Quite the contrary, it was the nature of any organization to develop ingeniousrationalizations to deflect those critiques (e.g. Herzberg’s charges of anti-professionalism) or, when challenged by raw political organization, to respond inkind (e.g. the Ad Hoc Committee). Consequently, Wolfe concluded there was “apoint in the development of insurgent groups within academic disciplines wherethey have to stop being internally critical of the practices and content of theirprofession and turn their attention to more important things.”95 He urged theCNPS and its individual members to shift their attention away from the disciplineto more productive activities, such as communicating directly with the generalpublic or organizing neighborhoods and communities.

A second activity pursued by insurgents in the social sciences was organizingwithin the academic professions for radical ends. Wolfe argued that organizinginside the APSA was a waste of time. First, he was convinced that radicals wouldalways be a minority in the political science discipline, so in the long run whatdifference would it make to have a Caucus member on the APSA’s ExecutiveCouncil or a Caucus member on the APSR’s editorial board? Organizing withinthe APSA would just lead to more muckraking for the sake of more muckraking,but it would never yield any substantial political gains or produce any substantialchange in the content of the APSR.

Second, the new political science had defined itself intellectually as a critique ofbehavioralism and pluralism, while politically it was articulating its organizationalaims in terms of traditional liberal values, such as academic freedom and fairrepresentation. In this respect, Wolfe considered it worth noting that the originalcritiques of behavioralism had come from Straussians and other politicalphilosophers, while the most widely accepted critique of pluralism had been thatof the interest group liberals, most of whom “were excellent scholars, but whocould hardly be considered political radicals.”96 In the short-run, Lowi wouldprobably exert more influence on the discipline than Miliband, so continuing thecritique of pluralism did not necessarily lead one beyond liberalism.

Thus, what were the next steps for the Caucus for a New Political Science?First, Wolfe suggested that the CNPS recognize that any hope of transforming thepolitical science discipline or of capturing its professional association werepipedreams. He echoed David Kettler, the current chairman of the CNPS (1969–1970), who worried that dissipating the members’ energies on these false promiseswould lead to cynical passivity after too many harsh defeats.97 The best the CNPS

98 Christian Bay, “Thoughts on the Purposes of Political Science Education,” in Graham,Jr. and Carey, op. cit., pp. 88–102; Theodore J. Lowi, “The Politics of Higher Education:Political Science as a Case Study,” in Graham, Jr. and Carey, op. cit., pp. 11–36; Henry Kariel,Saving Appearances: The Reestablishment of Political Science (Belmont, CA: WadsworthPublishing, 1972).

99 Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension,” op. cit., p. 61; Cf. Martin Nicolaus, “TheProfessional Organization of Sociology: A View from Below,” Antioch Review 29 (Fall 1969),pp. 375–387.

100 Wolfe, “Practising the Pluralism We Preach,” op. cit., p. 372.101 Alan Wolfe, “Unthinking about the Thinkable: Reflections on the Failure of the

Caucus for a New Political Science,” Politics and Society 1:3 (May 1971), pp. 398–406.102 Theodore J. Lowi, “The Politicization of Political Science,” American Politics Quarterly

1 (January 1973), pp. 43–71.

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could hope to achieve within the APSA, and within the wider profession, was tomake universities and the social science disciplines “places where we can do ourwork, including, of course, work between teachers and students.” In fact, many inthe Caucus began asking how to go about teaching a new political science andhow to pursue a politics of higher education that would create protected spacesfor such teaching.98

Second, Wolfe proposed that insurgent political scientists join with their morenumerous colleagues in disciplines such as sociology and history, and withcolleagues in other nations, to establish a new flagship journal and to create newinterdisciplinary professional associations of radical scholars. The purpose of anew journal was to provide a platform for the new political science unhindered bythe ideological and methodological restrictions of mainstream journals. Hepointed to the new Socialist Scholars Conference, which had been first convenedin 1965, as an example of the type of interdisciplinary association he had in mind.This type of interdisciplinary association, with its own flagship journal, mightgenerate the critical mass to confront existing disciplinary associations with a dualpower configuration.99 On the other hand, Wolfe predicted correctly that:

if reforms are instituted while the same political science I have described is adheredto, nothing will be gained. Interest will temporarily pick up; business meetings willbecome more lively for a while . . . candidates will run against one another; buteventually things will be pretty much the same.100

The Caucus as a whole ignored Wolfe’s prescriptions and pursued a vigorousorganizational strategy within the APSA. Following Hans Morgenthau’s failed bidfor the APSA presidency in 1970, the CNPS nominated Richard A. Falk (1971) and

Figure 1. CNPS APSA Presidential Nominees Votes Received (%), 1969–1979

103 Seidelman, op. cit., p. 198.104 “Introduction,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring 1979), pp. 8–10.


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then Peter Bachrach for the Presidency (1972–1973), with Bachrach capturing 49.5%of the vote in 1972 and coming within 60 votes (out of 6,471 cast) of winning thepresidency (see Figure 1). Following presidential bids by Murray Edelman (40.6%),Frances Fox Piven (37.9%), C. B. MacPherson (29.5%), Bertell Ollman (28.4%), andMichael Parenti (21.1%), the Caucus ceased to run any candidates for APSA office. In1980, organizational politics returned to normal when the officers and ExecutiveCouncil members put forward by the APSA Nominating Committee were electedunanimously in an uncontested election at the annual business meeting of the APSA.

In contrast, Wolfe did not run on the CNPS slate after running for APSA vice-president in 1969. He resigned from the Caucus in 1971 after publicly criticizing itas a failure.101 Similarly, after a brief membership, Theodore J. Lowi quit the CNPSat the peak of its electoral strength for having sacrificed the “intellectualrevolution” that spawned it for pursuit of a “political revolution.”102 However, asmall group of Caucus activists, including many who were also committed to theorganizational revolution, simultaneously pursued the intellectual revolution byestablishing Politics and Society, a new journal that published its first issue inNovember 1970.103 The journal’s editorial board consisted of Ira Katznelson(editor), Gordon Adams, Philip Brenner, Judith Coburn, Lewis Lipsitz, and AlanWolfe. Its 15-member group of advisory editors was a veritable who’s who of thenew political science, including Philip Abrams, Peter Bachrach, Henry Kariel,Christopher Lasch, Ralph Miliband, and Michael Parenti, among others.

Politics and Society soon emerged as a leading outlet for political analysesinformed by Marxist theory. However, in spring 1973 (volume 3, number 3), theadvisory editors were discontinued and the editorial board was reconstituted inways that signaled its drift away from the new political science toward whatwould eventually become “the new institutionalism.” Alan Wolfe left the journalin early 1976, and by the end of the 1970s Politics and Society no longer had anydirect relationship to the CNPS or its membership.

Politics and Society drifted away from its origins in the CNPS just as the Caucuswas reaching the end of its political phase in the APSA. However, the Caucusbegan a broadsheet in the late 1970s called New Political Science, which waselevated to the status of an official journal in 1979. In announcing the new journal,the editors observed that it signaled a transition from organizational activism tointellectual activism, which had been made necessary by the changing politicalcircumstances of the CNPS.104

Victor Wallis, a former CNPS chairman (1977–1978), pointed out that the Caucushad clearly passed its electoral peak in the APSA, with only one CNPS candidateelected to the APSA Executive Council in 1977 followed by a complete shutout in1978. Following Michael Parenti’s defeat as an APSA presidential candidate in 1979,the Caucus had reach the end of its active political role within the Association, and itwas for this reason that the CNPS needed “a full-scale alternative outlet” for its

105 Victor Wallis, “The Caucus at a Turning Point,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring 1979),pp. 89–92. This transition had been under discussion for several years. See Caucus for aNew Political Science, “Proposed Directions for the Caucus,” Report of the Committee onStructure Prepared for Discussion at the American Political Science Association Meetings,1975 (photocopy).

106 Jane Gruenebaum and Paul Thomas, “CNPS 1979,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring1979), pp. 92–94.

107 “The Socialist Academic,” New Political Science 1:2 (1979–1980), p. 3.

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views that would reach out “directly to the grassroots.” Wallis argued that theCaucus’s continued presence within the APSA “forces it to pay more than just lip-service to its supposedly unchallenged ideals of free inquiry and equality ofopportunity,” and therefore CNPS panels would “remain important for exchangesamong ourselves.” However, the journal New Political Science was considered animportant first step in establishing the CNPS as “a viable counter-institution to theAmerican Political Science Association.” The journal was to serve as the Caucus’smost immediate tangible challenge to APSA’s intellectual hegemony, but there wasa clear expectation at the time that the Caucus would be strengthened—and in thelong run superseded—by its dual character as a counter-association.105

Indeed, Jane Gruenebaum and Paul Thomas were elected co-chairs of the Caucusin 1978–1979 based on their commitment to continue building a counter-association,primarily by organizing independent local chapters that were expected to produce arapid growth in membership. Gruenebaum and Thomas echoed Wallis’s message bypointing out that the Caucus had a dual identity as both a caucus within the APSAand an independent existence as a counter-association (i.e. a 401(3)(c) non-profitcorporation). The organization’s emphasis might fluctuate between one identity orthe other depending on particular contexts and circumstances, but the prevailingview by 1979 was that the CNPS’s active political role within the APSA had come toan end. It was time to parlay its intellectual influence within the APSA into aplatform for building its identity as a separate counter-association. As Wolfe hadproposed earlier, a second step in this direction would be to build more links withsympathetic organizations in other disciplines, such as the Union for RadicalPolitical Economics and the Radical Historians Organization.106

This inward turn was reflected in the second issue of New Political Science,which was devoted to an analysis of “the socialist academic” and “the structure ofhigher education.” This issue declared that the Caucus would remain “committedto developing an understanding and critique of capitalist society, to helping createthe social changes needed to transcend it, and to replacing feelings of isolationwith a sense of community and collective action,” but it would now focus “itsenergies on building the strong organization needed to advance an alternativepolitics and to create a socialist center of gravity within the profession.”107

The CNPS was entering a new phase that would emphasize the creation of moresecure spaces for critical thought and political activity within the university.

What was Accomplished?

It is ironic that within three years of the Caucus’s founding, Alan Wolfe, one of thefounding members, had left the organization and authored a scathing critique ofthe CNPS for being focused on pseudo-politics instead of politics, while TheodoreLowi, one of the movement’s leading intellectual inspirations and a chartermember, had also left the Caucus and authored a similarly scathing critique ofthe CNPS for sacrificing intellectual revolution to organizational revolt. Whilecoming from divergent standpoints, both individuals criticized the Caucus fordiverting its efforts into organizational activism within the APSA and, thereby,abandoning both the ideals of political revolution (Wolfe) and intellectual revolution

108 Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 419.


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(Lowi) that had catalyzed the new political science. Only in 1979, after the Caucuswas organizationally exhausted, and the external political climate haddramatically changed, did the CNPS attempt a return to those original goals.

The Caucus for a New Political Science never won control of the AmericanPolitical Science Association, but it would be unfair to say that it failed to achieveany significant organizational gains. The CNPS secured its status as the firstofficially recognized caucus in the APSA with the right to organize its own panelsbeginning in 1969. The CNPS successfully initiated a process that broke the officialmonopoly over political discussion within the APSA. The Caucus probablyreached its apogee as an intellectual force in the early 1980s when Bertell Ollmanchallenged the APSA’s leadership to debate Caucus members in a series of well-attended panels that pitted Caucus members, such as Peter Bachrach, SheldonWolin, Stephen Bronner, John Ehrenberg, Ira Katznelson, Mark Kesselman, RalphMiliband, Bertell Ollman, Michael Parenti, and Frances Fox Piven againstrepresentatives of the behavioral establishment, such as Nelson Polsby, RobertDahl, Sidney Verba, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Aaron Wildavsky.108

The CNPS also promoted a greater concern in the APSA with the problem ofacademic freedom and with the special concerns of women, African Americans,and Latinos in the profession, and it supported the creation of official studycommittees and caucuses that at least secured better representation of theirconcerns in the APSA. Equally significant, there are now 37 organized sections inthe APSA, and it was the Caucus which created the conditions that made it bothnecessary and possible for the APSA to incorporate these diverse groups into theprofessional organization of political science. Whether in groups devoted topolitical theory, political economy, political history, biopolitics, ethnomethodol-ogy, ecology, or literature, the proliferation of these groups has enriched politicalscience by facilitating the discipline’s incorporation of interdisciplinaryapproaches, methods, and knowledge.

Thus, one of its long-term impacts on the discipline was to initiate the trendtoward organized sections, which now represent a plurality of methodologicalapproaches and topical areas of study previously excluded from the discipline. It istempting to say that these sections have been co-opted, marginalized, or ghettoized,but in fact it is the political science “discipline” that has been deconstructed withinits own organizational umbrella. While Caucus members remain a smallproportion of the APSA’s individual membership—about 7 percent—it establisheda precedent that resulted in the proliferation of “organized sections” to representthe growing interest among political scientists in interdisciplinary, subfield, andmethodological research that falls outside the official discipline. Political science isnow fragmented into so many subfields, methodological approaches, areaspecializations, and competing theories that “political scientists apparently cometogether at APSA meetings, but only in spatial terms.”109

109 Davora Yanow, “Practicing Discipline,” PS 36:3 (July 2003), pp. 398.110 Lee Sigelman, “The APSR in the Perestroika Era,” in Monroe, op. cit., pp. 323–324.

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Lee Sigelman, the current editor of the APSR, even concedes that politicalscience is now “hardly a ‘discipline’ at all in the sense of being a distinct branch oflearning. . . . These days it is harder than ever to find a center of intellectualgravity in our discipline.”110 One might lament this state of affairs and protest thatthis diversity is still not reflected in the official discipline as defined by its flagshipjournals, officers, and Executive Council. However, it is reflected in theproliferation of alternative journals, the distribution of panels at APSAconventions, in book series, the emergence of new interdisciplinary (and radical)professional associations, and course offerings at colleges. There is still a coregroup of APSA elites—an academic establishment—who reproduce themselves inofficial positions and dominate the Association’s journals, but it is unlikely thatthis academic establishment any longer exerts the kind of professional authorityor disciplinary power once attributed to it by the CNPS’s founders.

At the same time, Wolfe was correct to criticize the CNPS for reducing politicalactivism to professional activism. Lowi was also correct to criticize the CNPS forviewing organizational politics as synonymous with intellectual revolution.The fact is that capturing the APSA was never crucial to either the political orintellectual objectives of new political science, because the APSA does notorganize those relationships. The political relationships that were condemned bythe early Caucus were organized directly through the CIA, the National ScienceFoundation, the SSRC, private foundations, a network of private and corporateconsultant relationships, and many other linkages that have nothing to do withthe APSA and which the APSA can neither obstruct nor facilitate with any greatcapacity. These are relationships organized by corporations and the state.

The intellectual relationships—the official paradigm of political science—iscertainly reproduced by the Association’s flagship journal, but the APSR does notany longer define the discipline of political science. One creates a new politicalscience by doing new political science and not by capturing the APSA, much lessby winning a few positions on its Executive Council. Indeed, the APSA has beenalmost helpless to stop the proliferation of new political science in the explosion of“organized sections,” but also in the publication of alternative journals andthrough alternative scholarly conferences and professional associations (e.g.Union of Radical Political Economics, Socialist Scholars Conference, RethinkingMarxism Conference, Historical Materialism Conference, among many others),which collectively generate as much attendance as the annual APSA convention.

Even by the high standards of success established in The Caucus Papers, the CNPShas been comparatively successful in achieving its more realistic objectives. It has

111 Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” op. cit., p. 304, observes that “Something seemsto happen to people when they become political scientists, or maybe people who becomepolitical scientists were strange to begin with. But whatever the causal relationship, thisprofession is one of the least movable there is. (Economics may be worse).”

112 Seidelman, op. cit., p. 198.113 Ibid., p. 199. See also Raymond Seidelman, “Political Scientists, Disenchanted

Realists, and Disappearing Democrats,” in James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (eds),Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States (Ann Arbor, MI: University ofMichigan Press, 1993), pp. 311–325.

114 Dryzek, op. cit., p. 491.115 Lowi, “The Politicization of Political Science,” op. cit.


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sustained the critique of pluralism, advanced alternative post-behavioral socialscience methodologies, supported a journal and a book series, and made the practiceof radical political science—in many forms—tolerable, within a discipline inhabitedby people that Alan Wolfe described as intellectually immovable and just plainstrange.111 However, as Seidelman observes, the success enjoyed by the CNPS was:

confined to the narrow limits of changing the modes by which intellectuals thought,acted and communicated. . . . The reform constituency of reform political sciencebecame other political scientists themselves. . . . Indeed, the Caucus’s activitiescentered exclusively on the politics of political science itself.112

The result is that “the CNPS narrowed its goals to the concrete, material andlimited demands of an interest group within the discipline, trading theuncertainties of movement activity for a larger piece of the existing pie. . . .

Seldom were bridges sought between intellectual inquiry and movementpolitics.”113 John Dryzek repeats Seidelman’s assessment of the CNPS, but hiscriticism is harsher: “Its assault on the commanding heights of the APSA havingfailed, the Caucus settled down to life as one of the APSA’s ever-proliferatingOrganized Sections, sponsoring its own (eventually quite small) set of panels, andpublishing a journal, New Political Science, largely ignored by the rest of thediscipline.”114 In an oft-quoted criticism by Theodore Lowi, the “Caucus for aNew Political Science was converted into the Caucus for a New Political ScienceAssociation.”115

It seems in retrospect that Wolfe was correct about the limits to the“rationality” of the discipline, precisely because its leading members’ areintegrated into the US and global power structure. Political science is not justabout science; it is about ideology and power, but the structure of power andideology originates in locations not even touched by the American PoliticalScience Association. A critical article published in the APSR may be good for one’scareer, but is it likely to change many minds within the discipline much less withinthe general public? Thus, a real question for new political science is who is ouraudience? Who are we talking to today?

For just as the APSA does not organize the discipline’s relationship to the state,it also does not control access to the wider public. Conservatives have understoodthis fact better than radicals and leftists. There is a widely recognized cadre ofconservative public intellectuals, who have taken their case directly to the mediaand to the public with popular publications, talk shows on radio and television,and whose books, by the way, we assign as required reading in universityclassrooms even though most of the public intellectuals on the right are notuniversity professors. They abandoned the university as a liberal enclave andfound alternative modes of communication. As Wolfe observes in The CaucusPapers, “neither Marx nor Voltaire pursued his vocation within a university.”116

116 Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” op. cit., p. 306–307.117 Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension,” op. cit., p. 58.118 Roelofs, op. cit., p. 39, states that “the Caucus is not dedicated to any orthodoxy—or

unorthodoxy—in methodology, ideological persuasion, or subject matter interests.”119 “Note to Readers,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring 1979), p. 7.

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The Dialectics of New Political Science

Surkin and Wolfe argue that in its most general principles, the new politicalscience is not particularly different from the policy orientation described byHarold Lasswell.117 What makes the new political science radical is not itsmethodological challenge to behavioralism, its incessant questioning of pluralism,or even its critique of the role of intellectuals. What makes the new politicalscience a radical political science is the nature of the social problems it identifiesand the solutions that it proposes for those problems. A new and radical politicalscience does not seek solutions that adjust, adapt, and tinker with existingeconomic, social, and political institutions, but proposes new institutional formsas an alternative way of organizing those relationships. In its origins as a criticalapproach to the established discipline, it does not entail any necessarycommitment to a particular method, theory, or political ideology.118 It can only besaid that the new political science is a critical political science and a radicalpolitical science.

Yet, for this reason, the new political science fluctuates between the antinomiesof numerous identities. It has defined itself as both a methodological and anideological dissent from the mainstream discipline, but an individual need not beone to be the other and this dialectic establishes a constant source of intellectualand political tension within the organization. It is often ignored that from amethodological standpoint, the Straussians, who are ideologically conservative, ifnot reactionary, were among the first and most strident critics of behavioralism.Thus, a methodological critique of behavioralism is not coterminus with aparticular ideology, nor were many of the new political scientists anti-behavioralists except in their recognition of its methodological limitations. Is thenew political science a rejection of behavioralism, a refinement of behavioralism,or a supplement to behavioralism? It has been all of these things simultaneously.

When one shifts to the problem of ideology, the new political science hasdeveloped as an immanent critique of liberalism and as a radical alternative toliberalism. Its questioning of contemporary liberalism as pluralism originated inthe anti-pluralist critiques of Henry Kariel, Grant McConnell, Murray Edelman,and William E. Connolly, which during the CNPS’s founding culminated in theinterest-group liberalism of Theodore J. Lowi. Yet, by the conclusion ofthe Caucus’s organizational phase, its journal New Political Science presumed“the desirability of socialist transformation.”119 The new political sciencegenerally has been characterized by a consensus that social problems originatein the structures of liberalism, i.e. capitalist democracy, but there has been a wide-ranging and open-ended disagreement about how to define those problems andthe solutions to those problems.

Given the high priority accorded to theoretical analysis by the new politicalscience, it is no surprise that political philosophers and political theorists of manypersuasions have played a prominent role in the CNPS. However, the prominenceof political philosophers in the CNPS has frequently entangled the concept of a newpolitical science with the unique problems that political philosophers confronted inan increasingly behavioral discipline. Yet, as Christian Bay and others made clearfrom the beginning, the new political science is not the old political philosophy.In fact, Bay went to great lengths to dissociate the new political science from thetypes of anti-behavioral criticisms advanced by the Straussians, precisely because


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new political science rejects the fact-value distinction. Behavioralists andStraussians occupy opposite poles of the same false dichotomy. New politicalscience seeks to bridge that dichotomy, rather than reinforce it.

Finally, the Caucus for a New Political Science is often torn between its role as acaucus within the American Political Science Association and its existence ascounter-association. Critics of the Caucus, including former members, havevariously dismissed organizational activism as a diversion from the Caucus’sintellectual revolution (Lowi) and political revolution (Wolfe). While the CNPS isnow comfortably institutionalized within the APSA, it is highly unlikely that itwould have made the gains that it did make for its members in its early yearswithout organizational activism. It is testimony to the remarkable staying power ofthe academic establishment that so much organizational activism, including directconfrontation, was necessary to secure some modest gains. Moreover, it should notbe forgotten that only a few years ago, the APSA Executive Council adoptedminimum membership rules for organized sections that nearly dissolved theCNPS.

On the other hand, the CNPS is a counter-association albeit in a muted form atthe present time. It is the Caucus and not the organized section that owns andpublishes New Political Science. It is the Caucus, and not the organized section, thatpublishes the new political science book series. It is the Caucus that interacts withradical caucuses in other disciplines. It is the Caucus that has the opportunity tobuild a larger independent association that is interdisciplinary and internationalin its membership.

It is easy to say that new political science is all of these things, but as a practicalmatter it is all of these things, because each of these currents is represented withinits membership. It is the Caucus’s dual identity—and perhaps multipleidentities—that has been its strength over the years, and while it may veer toofar in one direction at certain times (e.g. internal organizing) and sacrifice gains inother areas as a result (e.g. external political alliances), this dual identity has arisenin response to shifting political circumstances within and without the APSA.Which way do we go now?

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The New Political Science APSA

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Transcript of The New Political Science APSA