Creating Political Reality

“Suit yourself.” —American colloquialism Currently fashionable modes of political analysis deserve acclaim today for at least two reasons: they provide opportunities for participating in a pleasurable if strenuous activity (regardless of the value of the end results) and they effectively come to terms with the surface facts of political reality. Our posterity, too, may find it easy to esteem the contemporary products of the profession of political science should it ever look back and see how an affection for craftsmanship is combined with the ability to please. Moreover, the reward system of the profession should appear as having been nicely designed to promote the present display of talent, ingenuity, variety, and success. There is evidence, in any case, that the prevailing inclination to work hard and to develop ever more powerful analytical tools is welcomed and reinforced within the discipline. All would seem to be well. Yet doubts continue to be expressed today even by those who govern the profession and engage in what Thomas Kuhn has called normal science. Partially, there is a petulant resentment among older practitioners, scholars who are made fretful and irritable by the entrepreneurial opportunism of the nouveau riche, by the feeling that mindless industriousness rather than scholarly contemplation is now rewarded by tenure as well as by space in journals, time on panels, positions on editorial boards, and cash for projects. It does not pain me, however, to disregard the indictment that comes from this source—not because I suspect its patrician origins but because I believe it is blind to the underlying impulse of empiricism, because it ignores the subversive, liberating thrust of empirical science.