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Oxford in Comparative Perspective 104 Robert E FORGING A DISCIPLINE OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/2/2014, SPi Forging a Discipline A Critical Assessment of Oxford’s Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER HOOD, DESMOND KING, AND GILLIAN PEELE 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # the several contributors 2014 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014931014 ISBN 978–0–19–968221–8 Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Contents List of Contributors vii Preface ix Acknowledgements xi Part I. Setting the Scene 1. Introduction 3 The Editors Part II. Origins and Overview: The Academic Study of Politics in Oxford and Elsewhere 2. A Tale of Three Cities: The Early Years of Political Science in Oxford, London, and Manchester 26 Rodney Barker 3. Warden Anson, All Souls College, and the Curious Creation of the Gladstone Chair of Political Theory and Institutions at Oxford, c.1908–1912 46 S. J. D. Green 4. The Role of Specialist Graduate Colleges in Disciplinary Development 67 Laurence Whitehead 5. Paradigms Lost: How Oxford Escaped the Paradigm Wars of the 1960s and 1970s 86 Alan Ryan 6. Political Science and Institution Building: Oxford in Comparative Perspective 104 Robert E. Goodin Part III. Developments: What it Led to, in Disciplines and Discoveries 7. Elections 124 John Curtice 8. Constitutionalism since Dicey 144 Iain McLean vi Contents 9. Political Theory, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences: Five Chichele Professors 165 David Miller 10. The Academic Normalization of International Relations at Oxford, 1920–2012: Structures Transcended 184 Martin Ceadel 11. The Study of War at Oxford 1909–2009 204 Hew Strachan 12. Beyond Zanzibar: The Road to Comparative Inductive Institutionalism 224 Jack Hayward 13. The Study of Communist and Post-Communist Politics 246 Archie Brown and Stephen Whitefield Part IV. An Assessment 14. Conclusion: What Can be Learned from the Oxford Politics Story? 267 The Editors Select Bibliography 281 Index 285 List of Contributors Rodney Barker is Emeritus Professor of Government at the London School of Economics and Emeritus Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. Archie Brown, CMG, FBA, is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Martin Ceadel is Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and Politics Tutor at New College, Oxford. John Curtice, FRSE, is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and has co-edited the annual British Social Attitudes Reports of the National Centre for Social Research since 1994. Robert E. Goodin, FBA, is Professor of Government at the University of Essex and Distinguished Professor of Social and Political Theory and Philosophy at the Australian National University. S. J. D. Green, FRHistS, FSA, is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leeds and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Jack Hayward, FBA, is Research Professor in Politics and International Studies at the University of Hull and Vice-President of the Political Studies Association of the UK. Christopher Hood, CBE, FBA, is Gladstone Professor of Government at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Desmond King, FBA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Govern- ment at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. Iain McLean, FBA, FRSE, is Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. David Miller, FBA, is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. Gillian Peele, FRHistS, is University Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Alan Ryan, FBA, is Lecturer with the Rank of Professor at Princeton University and was Warden of New College, Oxford from 1996 to 2009. viii List of Contributors Sir Hew Strachan, FRSE, FRHistS, is Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Stephen Whitefield is Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and Rhodes Pelczynski Tutorial Fellow in Politics, Pembroke College, Oxford. Laurence Whitehead is Official Fellow in Politics of Nuffield College, Oxford. Preface Although the history of political thought is a well-established field of study, the history of political science—or whatever other aliases the academic study of politics, government, and international relations goes under—tends to be much more fragmentary. But no one who has been involved in this academic field over the past thirty or forty years, as we all have, can fail to be struck by its remarkable growth, its march towards ever more ‘professionalism’ in style and methods, and by the rise and fall of different ‘paradigms’ or analytic ABCs. Some of those changes have been prompted by events in the world outside— such as the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1990s or unanticipated waves of democratization—and some by developments within the discipline itself, such as the rise of the ‘median voter theorem’. Observations of this changing intellectual scene prompt a number of questions. For example, where exactly did this ‘discipline’ come from, and what sort of a ‘discipline’ is it? How has it been shaped by politics in the world outside, and by the micro-politics of academic institutions? What have been the big changes in academic ap- proaches and in the ‘examinable corpus’ which students have to master? And where does it all go from here? Such questions are easier to ask than to answer, and as this volume shows, different answers can be given to many of them. Sociology has been jokingly described as a discipline in search of a subject matter, and public administra- tion as a subject matter in search of a discipline,1 and modern political science arguably faces a mixture of both problems, dependent on subfield or analytic approach. In this volume, we set out to provide perspectives on the develop- ment of the academic study of politics over a century in a single university, the University of Oxford, tracing out how it started in its modern form, the institutional elements that aided its development or held it back, some of the subfields that it divided into, and some of the big discoveries or intellectual landmarks that occurred along the way. Given that the academic study of politics today has proliferated into multiple subfields, we have explored its development by commissioning chap- ters from expert specialists on a sample (by no means a full set) of those subfields. But we have also commissioned two historical chapters to look at the beginnings of modern political science in the early twentieth century, long 1 See D. Waldo, ‘Scope of the Theory of Public Administration’, ch. 1 in J. C. Charlesworth (ed.), Theory and Practice of Public Administration: Scope, Objectives, and Methods (Philadel- phia: American Academy of Political and Social Science/American Society for Public Adminis- tration, 1968), 2. x Preface before there were specialist professional associations in the field, and also a set of chapters to consider how the development of the subject was shaped by institutional and social factors for which Oxford seems to present a critical case, as we argue in the introduction. And, as we argue in the conclusion, the story seems to present some intriguing challenges to some received views about how to organize academic teaching and research. This volume, like the activity of politics itself, reflects a mixture of collab- oration, communication, and contestation, and a lot of all of those elements have gone into its production (we have at least 1,000 emails apiece in our mailboxes to mark the various drafts and discussions that went into writing and editing this book). And also, as with the activity of politics itself, there are issues of credit and blame to be considered. As editors, our general advice to our contributors was to pay rather more attention to detailed assessments of the work of the dead than of those living and still active, on the grounds that it is easier to arrive at definitive assessments of the former than the latter. In some cases, as will be seen, applying that rule strictly would have got in the way of an adequate account of the development of some important subfields, but where it has been applied, it reflects our advice. Also, to make a volume of reasonable length, we had to insist on fairly tight length limits for each of the chapters, presenting most of our contributors with difficult choices as to what to include, and we therefore take responsibility for some of the omissions that necessarily occur in such conditions.
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