Handbooks and History: Is It Still the American Science of Politics?

Abstract

While the American origins of the discipline of political science have often been noted and stressed, it has also been argued that the field has been fundamentally transformed as it has migrated and been adapted to new political and scientific contexts. There is thus a question of the extent to which it is still an American science of politics. Although one might assume that the recent genre of English language handbooks and state-of-the-discipline studies devoted to establishing the identity of political science would contribute to a better understanding of this matter, this literature has lacked an adequate historical perspective. Representative examples of this genre, both those generated in the United States and those with an ostensibly more international focus, have remained bound to an American vision of the past and present of the discipline and have failed to take account of recent scholarship on the history of political science.