Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science: A Transatlantic Tale

Winner of the 2015 Award for Concept Analysis in Political Science American political science has been widely but loosely identified as a liberal science. Robert Adcock clarifies the place of American political science within the liberal tradition by situating its origins in relation to the transatlantic history of liberalism. The pioneers of American political science participated in transatlantic networks of intellectual and political elites that connected them directly to the evolution of liberalism in Europe. This book shows how these figures adapted multiple European liberal arguments to speak to particular challenges of mass democratic politics and large-scale industry as they developed in America. Political science's pioneers in the American academy were thus active agents of the Americanization of liberalism. In charting the emergence of American political science, Adcock shows how a distinct current of mid-nineteenth-century European liberalism was transformed into two alternative twentieth-century American liberalisms. When political science first secured a niche in America's antebellum academy, it advanced a democratized classical liberal vision that overlapped with the contemporary European liberalism of Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. As political science expanded during the dramatic growth of universities in the Gilded Age, controversy and cleavage within liberalism came to the fore in the area of political economy. During the late-nineteenth century, this cleavage was fleshed out into the alternative analyses of democracy and the administrative state advanced by two divergent liberal political visions: progressive liberalism and disenchanted classical liberalism. Both visions found expression among the early leaders of the new American Political Science Association, founded in 1903; and in turn, within the fierce contest over the meaning of "liberalism" as this term entered American political discourse from the mid-1910s on. The history of American political science allows us to see how a distinct current of mid-nineteenth-century European liberalism was transformed into alternative twentieth-century American liberalisms.

About the Author :
Robert Adcock is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American political and social thought, especially the history and methods of the modern social sciences, and the politics of knowledge.

Review :
"This work is an important contribution, and corrective, to the study of the widely acknowledged but variously conceived and much debated intersection between liberalism and the evolution of the social sciences in the United States. Adcock carefully and concretely examines the European sources of liberalism and how these ideas affected the development of American political science, which in turn played a significant role in Americanizing liberalism. Adcock has a deep and broad knowledge of the subject matter, and his work represents the best of a generation of innovative scholarship on the history of the social and political sciences." --John G. Gunnell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Albany "Robert Adcock brings astute analysis and admirable precision to nineteenth-century political science. Locating American political scientists' liberalism, historicism, exceptionalism, and scientific stance within a complex web of trans-Atlantic contact and cross-national comparative analysis, he shows that the conceptual and professional structures forged by the turn of the century set the foundations for the Americanized discipline of the twentieth century." --Dorothy Ross, Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emerita of History, Johns Hopkins University "Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science is a valuable contribution to the histories of both liberal political thought and the modern social sciences. With skill and precision, Adcock traces the British, French, and German intellectual currents that shaped the development of American political science during the nineteenth century, and the way in which American scholars recast them to make sense of a vast industrial democracy. Adcock also makes a convincing case that this intricate story of disciplinary evolution resonated beyond the lecture halls of the major research universities, and that debates in and around political science transformed the nature of liberal political thought itself. This book should be of great interest to both historians and political theorists." --Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge "Highly contestable and inextricably tied to norms about legitimate boundaries of power and democracy in the USA." --New Political Science "This exceptionally well-researched and lucid book promises to become the definitive history of the emergence of political science in the United States." --Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences "By grounding political science in liberalism rather than the nineteenth century science of politics, Adcock emphasizes the importance of economic as well as political ideas. Adcock's analysis will surely have legs." --American Political Thought Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science is a hugely intelligent, and important book. It immediately joins the very best of its kindred studies (in a growing body of literature) on the history of political science (and cognate fields)...The book's commentaries about the American side of the Atlantic ledger make it an instant candidate for inclusion in the (equally growing body of) literature on American political development" --Perspectives on Politics