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usually viewed instrumentally as ways of organizing data and in part because the
plurality of, often contending, approaches, theories, and methodologies tend to make
for multiple and conflicting identities which are given a historical dimension and become
part of the discipline’s rhetoric of inquiry. Yet, at the same time, and in part because of
the rhetorical purposes that have informed accounts of the discipline’s past, there has,
until very recently, been a lack of serious historical study. While political science has
often been almost obsessively concerned with its identity and genealogy, claims about
these matters have typically been presented in the context of exercises in self-
justification and or criticism. Graduate students in political science, including political
theory, characteristically enter a universe of discourse in terms of which they locate
themselves intellectually by learning exemplars and conducting themselves accordingly.
Seldom, however, do they possess more than, at best, a vague sense of the actual
evolution of the nexus of substantive and methodological issues into which they have
been injected and which constitute the horizons by which most remain bound even as
professional scholars.
One might argue that as the fledgling social sciences mature discussions of their
past will, and should, recede and, as in the case of natural science, become the
property of the field of history to which social scientists will no longer pay much
attention as they go about everyday work. There may be some evidence to support this
hypothesis, since the philosophy of social science has increasingly become a concern
of philosophers. One basic difference, however, is that in the case of social science,
scientific validity and the relationship between science and its subject matter are neither
simply intra-scientific nor philosophical issues. What is most distinctive about the social
Convention