49
countries and confronted general historiographical issues involved in disciplinary
history. At the meetings of both the American Political Science Association and the
International Political Science Association, panels on the history of the discipline had
become common, but this growing body of research made some of the methodological
issues surrounding such work increasingly salient and raised further questions about
the relationship between disciplinary history and disciplinary practice.
There is, however, still too often a tendency to revert to rhetorical histories
designed to support various claims about unity or disunity in the field or to support some
methodological persuasion. In 1996, Almond criticized recent research on research on
the history of the field for producing a far too pluralistic image of the field that failed to
underscore what he claimed was really, overall, a linear story of scientific progress. In a
volume devoted to assessing the state of the discipline of political science from an
international perspective, he presented an account of the history of political science that
was not only written from an exclusively American standpoint but was a quintessential
example of using history in the service of legitimation and the propagation of a
particular methodological persuasion.
61
One might still expect this kind of exercise in
presidential addresses and similar forums, but once the study of the history of the
discipline, whether by professional historians or by political scientists, has moved
John G. Gunnell, and Michael Stein, eds., Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the
Development of Political Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
61
See Gabriel Almond, "Political Science: The History of the Discipline," in Robert
Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, eds A New Handbook of Political Science
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and the critical discussion of this kind of
literature in John G. Gunnell, “Is It Still the American Science of Politics: Handbooks
and History,” International Political Science Review (2002).
Convention