Pluralism at Yale: The Culture of Political Science in America. By Richard M. Merelman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 325p. $55.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Because Richard Merelman was a Ph.D. student at Yale during the period that he writes about in this book, his project instantly arouses the suspicion, as he knows, that it stems more from personal than scholarly preoccupations. As a result, Pluralism at Yale is, if anything, excessively scholarly in its architecture and arguments. But regardless of where the motivation for his work ultimately comes from, Merelman's book exemplifies an unusual but eminently defensible, potentially illuminating mode of serious political science research. Ironically, its limitations come not from the fact that it centers on a remarkably in-depth study of a single political science department but from the ways it does not take that study far enough.