2.1 Revolutions We Have Known

Academics thrill at the thought of their disciplines having been racked by a series of “revolutions” (Kuhn 1962). It is the great aim of every aspiring academic to be at the forefront of the next revolution.

But of course revolutions rarely are quite as consequential as their advocates hope, or their opponents fear. Most things go on pretty much the same, on the other side of the revolution. Bismarck’s social insurance legislation remained on the books under Hitler and afterwards in remarkably similar form in East and West Germany alike (US DHEW 1978). A revolution installs a new regime to which one is obliged to pay polite obeisance, and it genuinely gets in the way of some things you want to do. But generally you can work around it, to carry on much as before.

How “big” a revolution has to be to qualify as a revolution—how much of the territory it has to occupy, and just how much control it has to exercise over it—is a particularly open question when it comes to scientific revolutions (Dryzek 2006b, 487). I thus prefer to couch the next section’s prognostications in terms of what might be the next “big thing,” rather than the next “revolution.” Still, the discipline’s self- conception of its past is firmly organized around epochs punctuated by successful revolutionary takeovers, so let me begin by introducing the discipline in those, its own preferred terms.

According to the standard periodization, political science in the USA has been marked by three successful revolutions.The first was that which founded the discipline at the very beginning of the twentieth century: the turn away from the dilettantish do-gooderism of the American Social Science Association and toward systematic and professionalized study of political processes. The second successful revolution shaping the US discipline was the behavioral revolution of the 1950s, a self- styled break away from the previous preoccupation with what is formally supposed to happen and toward how people actually behave politically. The third successful revolution shaping the US discipline was the rational choice revolution of the 1970s, promising a break from “mindless empiricism” and offering instead a tight set of theoretical propositions deduced from a Spartan set of fundamental assumptions.

Those are the “storylines” of the discipline, at least in the USA. Elsewhere, even in the anglophone world and certainly outside it, those revolutionary waves eithercame much later or passed political science there by altogether (Barry 1999). And even as regards the US discipline, those highlighted storylines are only part of the larger story. Much going on in each period was at best only loosely connected to (and much more was wholly apart from) the ostensibly dominant storyline. There were important subthemes and counterpoints in each period, some of which went on to form the basis of the next “revolutionary challenge.” Some sub-disciplinary and sub-subdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary projects proceeded largely impervious to the imperial ambitions of the latest successful revolutionary cadre and were largely ignored by it: Public and Constitutional Law has always rather like that.Others were definitely on the radar of people working across many different fields: The “new institutionalism” was certainly like that, having been widely embraced as the “next big thing” across the discipline as a whole over the past decade or more (Goodin and Klingemann 1996b, 11).

More will be said shortly about each of these various movements that have washed over the discipline. But that highly synoptic characterization will suffice to set up the principal point that I want to make at this stage. That point is simply that, by virtue of that self-conception of its past, the discipline has come to acquire an accumulated “core” body of knowledge that must be mastered by aspirants to the profession.