4 Disciplines We Have Known

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Readers can judge for themselves the state of contemporary political science, after having perused the following chapters. Those constitute less a comprehensive survey than a select sample of what is currently under way within the discipline.

Still, even that small sample suffices—to my mind, at least—to illustrate both the unity and the diversity of contemporary political science. Much good work— interestingly different, yet powerfully complementary—is under way. Synergies abound. There is a genuine sense of excitement at forging research collaborations across long-standing divides. Different sub-disciplines are borrowing from, and con- tributing to, one another in ways and to extents not seen for years. Rejecting the illogic of “either–or,” scholars are crafting judicious blends of different methodologies to give richer and more nuanced analyses of important political phenomena that are easily distorted or obscured when viewed through a single methodological lens alone.

What has made all this progress possible, I submit, is not any loosening of the discipline of political science. Rather, that progress is attributable to the strength of the discipline’s discipline. If we were all freed from the discipline of the discipline merely to “go off and do our own thing,” then very few of these extraordinarily fruitful collaborations would have come about. It is the obligation to talk together, the sense of shared purpose, of shared histories and shared touchstones in the professional literature, that brings political scientists—however different their particular concerns and approaches—together to read, critique, and profit from one another’s work. The discipline is a pluralist one, but the plurality is contained within and disciplined by a discipline.⁶³ Diversity is a healthy attribute of a gene pool—but only if the carriers of those diverse genes actually interbreed. So too in the talent pools constituting an academic discipline (Aldrich, Alt, and Lupia 2008).