9
democratic thought and one that, through various forms of media and levels of
pedagogy, has played a singular role in everyday conceptions of politics and
government.
One of the difficulties in recovering the real past of political science is that it had,
from its earliest disciplinary and professional origins, a built-in understanding of its past
that was a crucial element of its rhetoric of inquiry. The classic texts of political
philosophy were not only part of the subject matter of the discipline but were
characteristically construed as the elements of a tradition that represented the past of
the field.
7
Many early studies in the history of political theory were explicitly presented
as accounts of the development of political science and as establishing its roots in
ancient Greece.
8
This image, whether celebrated or in some manner criticized, would
never be entirely jettisoned, and it contributed to inhibiting close attention to the actual
history of the discipline. Prior to the so-called “behavioral revolution” and controversies
surrounding the behavioral “movement,” there was a general and persistent consensus
about the progress of political science or at least about what would constitute such
Scientific Study of Politics,” Daedalus 126 (1997).
7
For a critical discussion of this genre, see John G. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition
and Interpretation (Cambridge: Winthrop, 1979); Between Philosophy and Politics: The
Alienation of Political Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986);
"Annals of Political Theory: Replies and Reflections," in John Nelson (ed.) Tradition,
Interpretation, and Science (State University of New York Press,
1986).
8
See, for example, Frederick Pollock, An Introduction to the History of the Science of
Politics (London: Macmillan, 1890); Robert H. Murray, The History of Political Science
from Plato to the Present (New York: Appleton, 1925); Walter James Shepard, “Political
Science,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, The History and Prospects of the Social Sciences
(New York: Knopf, 1925).
Convention