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The State of the Discipline*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

V. O. Key Jr.
V. O. Key Jr.
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

When the turn of fate brings to a man the honor of speaking on this occasion, he is likely to review the remarks of his predecessors. Their practice, I find, has been, in the main, to address themselves to one or the other of two kinds of themes. They discourse either upon a substantive problem within their own specialty or upon a matter of common concern to us as members of the same profession. As our interests have become more diverse, the second alternative seems to have been followed with greater frequency. My decision to consider in my remarks the state of our discipline has, therefore, the support of precedent if not the merit of prudence.

The burden of my argument may be stated briefly and bluntly. It is that the demands upon our profession have grown more rapidly than has the content of our discipline. We are, in a sense, the victims of our own success. The achievements of our profession arouse expectations that our discipline enables us to meet only imperfectly.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , December 1958 , pp. 961 - 971
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

1 The Office of Education reported for 1955–56 that 5,670 bachelors' degrees were conferred in political science; 554, in international Relations.—Earned Degrees Conferred by Higher Educational Institutions, 1955–56 (Circular No. 499), p. 19.

2 One recent survey fixes this percentage at 76.7, with the warning that the respondents included a disproportionately high number of teachers.—Personnel Resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Department of Labor Bulletin No. 1169), pp. 95, 129.

3 Waldo, Dwight, Political Science in the United States of America (Paris: UNESCO, 1956)Google Scholar.

4 The following characterization of our discipline could not have been made a few decades ago: “Allowing for local variants, political science in the United States today may be said to focus on political behavior in the widest sense of the term. And this is true in varying degree of all contemporary political scientists, whatever their own specialized field may be ….”—Odegard, Peter H., “A New Look at Leviathan,” in Frontiers of Knowledge in the Study of Man, edited by White, Lynn Jr., (New York: Harper, 1956)Google Scholar.

5 I have touched upon some of the problems of adaptation of such techniques to the traditional problems of politics in “Strategy in Research on Public Affairs,” Items, Vol. 10 (1956), pp. 29–32Google Scholar.

6 For one of the exceptions, see Garceau, Oliver, “Research in the Political Process,” this Review, Vol. 45 (1951), pp. 69–85Google Scholar.

7 For two such considerations, see Frederick M, Watkins, “Political Theory as a Datum of Political Science,” and Friedrich, Carl J., “Political Philosophy and the Science of Politics,” in Approaches to the Study of Politics, edited by Young, Roland (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

8 The bibliographical check was of those persons (except Orientals) listed in Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities for 1934–35, 1935–36, and 1936–37, under the categories political science and international law and relations.

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