Dear BU Readers, I've Prefaced the Book Manuscript Chapter on Wilson

Dear BU Readers, I’ve prefaced the book manuscript chapter on Wilson that I’m presenting with a table of contents and opening pages of my introduction so you can see where this chapter (Chapter 6) fits within the overall manuscript. You’ll note on the table of contents a conclusion entitled “The Past and the Present of Political Science.” I plan to write a conclusion that highlights and synthesizes the points made in the history I tell that are most resonant for us in the field today. One thing I hope to get out of this presentation is a read on what points in the Wilson chapter most engage you, as political scientists of “the present,” to help me decide how to focus the conclusion. THE AMERICAN BIRTH OF POLITICAL SCIENCE: LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. Liberalism and the Birth of Political Science……………………..………. PART ONE: EUROPEAN EXEMPLARS Chapter One. The “Political” in Political Science: The Classical Liberal Debate about Democracy…………………..………………………………….…..……… Chapter Two. The “Science” in Political Science: German Universities and the Varieties of Historicist Science…………………..…..………………… PART TWO: AMERICAN PRECURSORS Chapter Three. Classical Liberalism and Political Science in the American College: Francis Lieber and Theodore Dwight Woolsey………….………………… Chapter Four. Political Science and Political Economy in Post-Civil War America: Andrew Dickson White and William Graham Sumner……………………. Chapter Five. Historical and Political Science at the John Hopkins University: Training PhDs and Founding National Associations ……………………… PART THREE: AMERICAN PIONEERS Chapter Six. From Democratized Classical Liberalism to Progressive Liberalism: The Political Science of Woodrow Wilson……………………….………. Chapter Seven. The Politics of Mass Democracy in Transatlantic Perspective: James Bryce and A. L. Lowell on Parties and Public Opinion……………. Chapter Eight. Founding a Freestanding Field: From the Columbia School of Political Science to the American Political Science Association………………….. .. Conclusion. The Past and the Present of Political Science……..………….…………… 1 INTRODUCTION. LIBERALISM AND THE BIRTH OF POLITICAL SCIENCE “A new political science is needed for a world altogether new.”1 - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Preface to Vol. 1 (1835) Multiple histories can be told of political science. Some start with the philosophers of classical Athens.2 Others start with the sciences of the state (Staatswissenschaften) of the early-modern German universities, or with the moral sciences of the Scottish Enlightenment.3 But if we are specifically interested in political science in its contemporary form as one of the institutionally differentiated academic fields that together make up today’s social sciences, then it was born in America at the turn of the twentieth century. Its birth deserves close attention from historians of liberalism as well as historians of the social sciences. The field that developed in America, and subsequently grew to a scale and international intellectual influence unmatched by any other nation’s twentieth-century scholarship about politics, embodies and expresses liberal beliefs, hopes, and fears. This book situates the American birth of political science as an episode in the transatlantic history of liberal political thought. My study contributes in three ways to our understanding of the intertwined histories of political science and liberalism. First, I emphasize the plurality and historicity of liberalism. My interest is in alternative liberal political visions, their contrasts and interactions, and how they 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7. 2 Gabriel A. Almond, “Political Science: The History of the Discipline,” in A New Handbook of Political Science, eds. Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 50-96. Almond carries forward a venerable tradition in starting with classical Athens, see for example, Sir Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of Politics, New Revised ed. (London: Macmillan, 1914). 3 For an interpretation of the Staatswissenschaften as central to the history of political science, see Wilhelm Bleek, Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2001), chap. 3; cf. David F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of the State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chap. 1. On Scottish Enlightenment moral sciences, see James Farr, “Political Science and the Enlightenment of Enthusiasm,” American Political Science Review 82, no. 1 (1998): 51–69. 2 change in response to challenges to the beliefs, hopes, or fears that structure them. I hence study the American birth of political science in terms of, and to illuminate, multiple liberalisms.4 In exploring precursors and pioneers of the field I highlight three liberal visions: democratized classical liberalism, which crystallized in the 1830s, and with somewhat reworked content, reached its high tide in post-Civil War America; and the twin competing visions of progressive liberalism and disillusioned classical liberalism, forged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century through divergent critical adaptations of democratized classical liberalism. These three visions contrast in multiple ways, but most significantly for political science, they disagree about the character and potential of democracy. My history of the birth of political science is therefore, at the same time, a history of debates within liberalism about democracy.5 American progressive liberalism has been much studied, and its integral relation to the birth of political science as an academic field well established. But neither the democratized classical liberalism that preceded it, nor the disillusioned classical liberalism that competed with it, have received as much, or as charitable consideration.6 I give equal attention to all three liberal political visions. 4 The founding book in the genre of disciplinary history, Crick’s The American Science of Politics, emphasized the liberalism of American political science. But Crick, under the influence of Louis Hartz, treated American liberalism as an enduring Lockean monolith. Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Bruce and Company, 1955); for more on Crick’s book and its reception, see Michael Kenny, “History and Dissent: Bernard Crick's The American Science of Politics,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 547-53. 5 I thank Emmanuel Teitelbaum for this phrasing. In setting up this book as a history of debates within liberalism about democracy I seek to bridge a divergence in recent scholarship. Intellectual historians have studied political scientists alongside members of other disciplines, situating them together in broader cultural and political contexts, and in doing so highlighting their liberalism. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). By contrast, recent disciplinary histories by political scientists make the concept of democracy—so enduringly pivotal to the internal discourse of the field— a centerpiece of their studies. Ido Oren, Our Enemies and US: America’s Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); James Farr, “Political Science,” in The Modern Social Sciences, Vol. 7 in Cambridge History of Science, eds. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 306-28; John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 6 By “charitable” I have in mind charity as a principle of interpretation that favors presenting a vision in its clearest and most compelling moments. I strive to be charitable in this sense to all the liberal visions I engage in this book. 3 My book’s second contribution is to interpret American intellectual developments in a transatlantic perspective.7 The Americans who shaped political science as an academic field were deeply engaged with nineteenth-century European thought.8 They drew from British, German, and French intellectual currents of primarily liberal orientation, and adapted these transatlantic inheritances to address tensions between liberalism and nineteenth century American democratic principles (ex. faith in the political capacities of the common man) and practices (ex. the spoils system). The shaping of political science through the selective adaptation of European influences is one major episode within the Americanization of liberalism, a broad process interwoven with the democratization of liberalism, and which eventually saw America supplant Europe during the twentieth century as the leading home of innovations in the liberal tradition. To see the American birth of political science as a part of this broader process necessitates a transatlantic perspective that studies Americans in light of European liberal beliefs, hopes, and fears they engaged. Intellectual

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