Patricians, Professionals, and Political Science

This essay sketches the strictures put on political scholarship from the early days of patrician amateurs to modern academic professionals, with special attention given to the emergence of political science and the methodological and ideological issues that developed within that discipline. It is argued herein that although some degree of ethno-class variety was eventually achieved in academia, there has been a lag in ideological diversity. Political heterodoxy often has been discouraged and suppressed. Nevertheless some modest democratic advances have been made in academia in the last half-century.