What’s in a Name? From New Political Science to Critical Political Science

Abstract

There is no evidence that the founders of the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) put much thought into the organization’s name because it was initially founded as an ad hoc caucus and there was no expectation that it would still exist more than a half-century later. However, even in the intellectual context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the name “New Political Science” was something of an oddity as comparable dissident movements in other social science and humanities disciplines were adopting the terms Radical or Critical to name their new insurgent organizations. After decades of debate, the CNPS finally voted in September 2021 to change its name to the Caucus for a Critical Political Science and to adopt a new mission statement identifying it as “an association of critical scholars committed to making the study of political science relevant to building a more democratic and egalitarian economic, social, and political order.”

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Martin Parker and Robyn Thomas, “What is a Critical Journal?” Organization, Vol. 18, No. 4 (July 2011): 419–27.

2 Christian Bay, “Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical Evaluation of Some Behavioral Literature,” American Political Science Association, Vol. 54, No. 1 (March 1965): 39–51. For a sampling of the behavioralist literature at the time, see David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953); David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965); David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965); Heinz Eulau, Samuel J. Eldersveld, and Morris Janowitz, eds., Political Behavior: A Reader in Theory and Research (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956); S. Sidney Ulmer, ed., Introductory Readings in Political Behavior (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1961); James C. Charlesworth, ed., The Limits of Behavioralism in Political Science (Philadelphia, PA: American Academy of Political Social Science, 1962); Austin Ranney, ed., Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1962); Heinz Eulau, The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (New York, NY: Random House, 1963).

3 Henry Kariel, The Decline of American Pluralism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961); William E. Connolly, Political Science and Ideology (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1967); William E. Connolly, ed., The Bias of Pluralism (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1969); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1971); Matthew A. Crenson, The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decision making in the Cities (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).

4 Charles A. McCoy and John Playford, eds., Apolitical Politics: Critique of Behavioralism (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1967).

5 Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe, eds., An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970). The term Caucusistas is borrowed from John S. Dryzek, “Revolutions without Enemies: Key Transformations in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 100, No. 4 (November 2006): 487–92.

6 David Easton, “The New Revolution in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 1 (March 1969): 1051–61.

7 New Political Science Section, “Minutes of the Annual Business Meeting,” held at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Thursday, September 23, 2021 (via Zoom), 12:00–1:00 PM (Pacific), 3.

8 Caucus for a New Political Science, “Constitution (as Revised Fall 1978).” Copy in author’s possession.

9 See note 7 above.

10 Government of the District of Columbia, Certificate of Incorporation: Caucus for a Critical Political Science (Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, Corporations Division, 2021).

11 Albert Somit, and Joseph Tanenhaus, American Political Science: A Profile of a Discipline (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1964).

12 Stephen T. Leonard, “The Pedagogical Purposes of a Political Science,” in James Farr, John S. Dryzek, and Stephen T. Leonard, eds., Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66–98.

13 Clyde W. Barrow, “The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 2017): 437–72.

14 American Political Science Association, “Constitution,” (2011), Available at: https://www.apsanet.org/portals/54/Files/APASConstitution2011.pdf

15 Christian Bay, “Communications: To the Editor,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (December 1967): 1096. See, American Political Science Association, “Final Report of the American Political Science Association, Committee on Professional Standards and Responsibilities: Ethical Problems of Academic Political Scientists,” PS, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Summer 1968): 3–29.

16 Bay, “Communications: To the Editor,” 1096.

17 H. Mark Roelofs, “Communications: To the Editor,” PS, Vo. 1, No. 1 (Winter 1968): 38.

18 Ibid., 40. Other members of the founding executive committee were Ronald Bayer (University of Chicago), Tom Blau (University of Chicago), Alex Gottfried (University of Washington), Edward C. Hayes (University of California, Berkeley), Sanford V. Levinson (Harvard University), Alden E. Lind (University of North Carolina), David Morris (Institute for Policy Studies), and Marvin Surkin (Moravian College).

19 The author has not yet reviewed the Christian Bay papers archived at the University of Toronto so the author holds out the possibility that these papers may shed some light on the choice of name.

20 Richard Peet, “Celebrating Thirty Years of Radical Geography,” Environment and Planning A, Vol. 2, No. 6 (June 2000): 951–3; Noel Castree, “Professionalisation, Activism, and the University: Whither ‘Critical Geography?” Environment and Planning A, Vol. 32, No. 6 (June 2000): 955–70; J. Trevor Barnes, “Critical Notes on Economic Geography from Aging Radical. Or Radical Notes on Economic Geography from an a Critical Age,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2002): 8–14; Luiza Bialasiewicz, “The Many Wor(l)ds of Difference and Dissent,” Antipode, Vol. 35, No. 1 (February 2003): 14–23.

21 See, Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff, eds., The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982).

22 Mark Kesselman, “The State and Class Struggle: Trends in Marxist Political Science,” in Ollman and Vernoff, eds., The Left Academy, 82–83. Bertell Ollman, Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1978), 100 concurs that “Capital contains a theory of the state which, unlike Marx’s economic theories, is never fully worked out.” See, also, Mark Kesselman, “The Conflictual Evolution of American Political Science: From Apologetic Pluralism to Trilateralism and Marxism,” in J. David Greenstone, ed., Public Values and Private Power in American Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

23 Clyde W. Barrow, “The Miliband-Poulantzas Debate: An Intellectual History” in Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, eds., Paradigm Lost: Revising State Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3–52.

24 Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

25 In 1969, Louis Kampf, a radical with strong Marxist leanings was elected second-vice president of the Modern Language Association, which led to his election as president in 1971, see, “The MLA in World History,” available at The MLA in World History|Modern Language Association. In 1977, Eugene Genovese made national news by defeating Oscar Handlin to become president of the Organization of American Historians, see, “Genovese, a Marxist, Will Head Historians,” New York Times, April 9, 1977, 8. Two years later, William A. Williamson, also a Marxist was elected president of the Organization of American Historians, see, “William Appleman Williams Papers, 1877–2012: Biographical Note,” Available at Oregon State University, Biographical Note, Timeline for William Appleman Williams – William Appleman Williams Papers, 1877–2012 – Special Collections & Archives Research Center, Oregon State University Libraries.

26 Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carl Ladd, Jr. provided a significant complement to Somit and Tanenhaus’s profile of the discipline by conducting a survey of 60,477 faculty members in American universities in the Fall of 1969 for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. They found that 56.8% of political science faculty “approved of radical student activism with reservations,” while 5.9% “unreservedly approved” of radical student activism. At the same time, and only a decade after the McCarthy Era had come to an end, they found that 13.8% of political science faculty now identified themselves as politically “Left” compared to 58.0% who considered themselves “Liberal.” However, among political science graduate students (25%) and faculty under age 30 (22%), the proportion who self-identified as “leftists” as opposed to “liberals” increased significantly, see, Everett Carl Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, “Portrait of a Discipline: The American Political Science Community, Part II,” Teaching Political Science, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1975): 144–71.

27 “Caucus, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 995. The origins of the word “caucus” are mysterious and obscure, but it unquestionably originated in colonial New England. It was possibly an Anglicized version of the Algonquin word “caucauasu,” which means “adviser.”

28 “Caucus,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Available at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/caucus

29 Dwight Waldo, “Political Science: Tradition, Discipline, Profession, Science, Enterprise,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science; Political Science: Scope and Theory, Vol. 1 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 77.

30 “Election Platform: Caucus for a New Political Science,” (1969). Copy in the author’s possession.

31 John S. Dryzek, “The Once and Future Discipline,” Polity, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter 1988): 439–46 (440).

32 Waldo, “Political Science,” 78. Waldo located the political science discipline’s most powerful “secessionist tendencies” in its sub-fields, such as public administration, international relations, and political theory, where independent associations such as the American Society for Public Administration (1945), International Studies Association (1959), and the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (1967) had already emerged as alternatives to the APSA based on sub-field specialization, rather than ideology or methodology. See also, Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, “Dividing the Domain of Political Science: On the Fetishism of Subfields,” Polity, Vol. 38, No. 1 (January 2006): 41–71.

33 Waldo, “Political Science,” 38.

34 Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of Political Science, 109–110. See, for example, Charles E. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925); G. E. G. Catlin, The Science and Method of Politics (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927).

35 Howard B. White, “The Processed Voter and the New Political Science,” Social Research, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer 1961): 127–8, 150. In a prescient statement, White (p. 150) declared: “I believe that the American Political Science Association will resume its traditional independence and its guiding role when that cry of ‘shame’ at what the experts are often doing reverberates in the halls of its conventions, and grows from its present whisper to a resounding echo in the colleges and universities. Otherwise, we shall pay a price for value-free political science, and the price will be too high.”

36 Herbert J. Storing, ed., Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962).

37 John H. Schaar and Sheldon S. Wolin, “Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics: A Critique,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 57, No. 1 (March 1963): 125–50 (125).

38 The author has corresponded with many of the Caucus’s original founders and none of them could provide any insights into how or why the organization named itself the Caucus for a New Political Science. The general consensus is that it was a “crazy time,” and things were just happening very quickly.

39 John Rensenbrink, “CNPS and NPS: Pitfalls and Prospects,” New Political Science, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1982): 93. Rensenbrink was a professor of political science at Bowdoin College, who later helped found the Green Party in 1984.

40 A large majority of CNPS members were clustered in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the New England states.

41 Rensenbrink, “CNPS and NPS,” 93.

42 Ibid., 94.

43 “Caucus News,” New Political Science, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1981): 117.

44 Ibid.

45 See note 41 above.

46 See note 42 above. Carl Lankowski, “Report to the Membership, January 1981,” New Political Science, Vol. 2, No. 1–2 (1981), 101.

47 Lankowski, “Report to the Membership,” 100.

48 Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1983).

49 The failure to include women, Blacks, and Latinos in the CNPS conference program, and in leadership positions, was a long-standing complaint against the Caucus going back to its founding.

50 Email from Timothy Luke to Clyde W. Barrow, November 24, 2017.

51 Email from Laura Katz Olson to Clyde W. Barrow, June 15, 2021.

52 Email from Stephen E. Bronner to Clyde W. Barrow, June 14, 2021.

53 Rensenbrink, “Should the Caucus Form an Organized Section,” PS, Vo. 15, No. 4 (Autumn 1982): 570.

54 See note 50 above.

55 See note 53 above.

56 Leo Panitch, “The Impoverishment of State Theory,” in Aronowitz and Bratsis, eds., Paradigm Lost: Revising State Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 89–104.

57 Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge; translation from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

58 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York, NY: Harper and Row Publishers, 1972), 12; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1987). For example, Bernard Henri-Levi, Barbarism With a Human Face (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1977), 68, called for “a provisional politics, a small-scale program, which some of us think can only be precarious, uncertain, and circumstantial – in a word, a matter of feeling.”

59 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1980), 11; Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March 1991): 77–96, applies Foucault’s approach to state theory to conclude that “focusing on the state as essentially a phenomenon of decision making or policy is inadequate,” since the state is “as an effect of detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification, and supervision and surveillance, which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society” and, consequently, “the state should not be taken as a free-standing entity, whether an agent, instrument, organization or structure, located apart from and opposed to another entity called society” (p. 95).

60 Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff, eds., The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), Vol. III.

61 “APSA Institutes Sections,” PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 15, No 4 (Fall 1982), 629.

62 Rensenbrink, “Should the Caucus Form,” 569.

63 Stephen M. Sachs, Caucus Forum (Summer 1983), 1. Copy in author’s possession.

64 Ibid., 2.

65 Meredith Reid Sarkees, Caucus for a New Political Science Newsletter (undated, but 1989). Copy in author’s possession.

66 Email from John C. Berg to Clyde W. Barrow, July 3, 2021.

67 Ibid.

68 “Letter from Kay Sterling, Staff Assistant for Organized Sections to Professor Joseph Kling, May 1, 1991.” Copy in author’s possession.

69 This term was coined by Kirstie McClure, a professor of political theory at UCLA, at a San Francisco meeting of the American Political Science Association. The core group of this so-called mafia were all former students of Richard Ashcraft, a Marxist political theorist at UCLA, including Clyde W. Barrow (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth), Bradley J. Macdonald (Colorado State University), William Niemi (Western State College of Colorado), and Daniel O’Connor (California State University Long Beach). To cement their integration into CNPS, Steger successfully pushed for Barrow’s election as Membership Director in 1994 in his first year as a CNPS member.

70 Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 1, 9.

71 Theodore Lowi, “Every Poet His Own Aristotle,” in Monroe (ed.), Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 45–52.

72 Dryzek, “Revolutions without Enemies,” 491.

73 “Minutes.” Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) and APSA Organized Section (NPS), Annual General Membership Meeting, Thursday, August 28, 2008, 6:15dpm, Boston, Hynes Room 101.

74 Catherine E. Rudder, 2000. “Executive Director’s Report,” (PSOnline: 2000), Available at www.apsanet.org.

75 “Minutes: Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) and APSA Organized Section (NPS), Annual General Membership and Business Meeting,” Friday, September 3, 2010, 6:15–7:15 PM, Omni Executive Room, Washington, D.C., 3.

76 Ibid.

77 Linda Davis, APSA Section Director to Clyde W. Barrow, Chair, New Political Science Section (no date, circa September 2010). Copy in author’s possession.

78 Email from Richard Delahunty (Taylor & Francis) to Mark Mattern (NPS Co-Editor), October 1, 2010 8:21 AM. Copy in author’s possession.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 “Email from Nancy S. Love and Mark Mattern to CNPS List Serve,” (no date, 2010). Copy in author’s possession.

82 “Email from Clyde W. Barrow to CNPS Coordinating Council and Publications Executive Committee,” (2011). Copy in author’s possession.

83 David Fasenfest, “Critical Sociology After 40 Years: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2014): 3–6.

84 See, Aims and Scope: Critical Sociology: SAGE Journals (sagepub.com). The journal has an impact factor that has recently varied from 1.88 to 2.68.

85 For example, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publications, Brill, and Guilford.

86 Letter from Internal Revenue Service, District Director to Caucus for a New Political Science, August 23, 1979, which states “we have determined you are exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the International Revenue Code. Copy in author’s possession.

87 Caucus for a New Political Science & APSA Organized Section (NPS), “Minutes: Coordinating Council Meeting,” Friday, April 9, 2020 1:000–2:00 PM (Via Zoom).

88 Clyde W. Barrow, Untitled Document, June 14, 2021. Copy in author’s possession.

89 Email from Sarah Surak, CNPS Secretary to Coordinating Council, June 28, 2021. Copy in author’s possession.

90 The Coordinating Council members present at the meeting were Nancy S. Love (Chair), William Sokoloff (Treasurer), Sarah Surak (Secretary), Clyde W. Barrow, Edwin Daniel Jacob, Robert Kirsch, and Claire Snyder-Hall, see, Caucus for a New Political Science & APSA Organized Section (NPS), “Coordinating Council Meeting – Special Meeting, August 2, 2021, 1:00–2:00 PM” (Via Zoom). Copy in author’s possession.

91 Ibid.

92 The Coordinating Council members present at the meeting were Nancy S. Love (Chair), William Sokoloff (Treasurer), Sarah Surak (Secretary), Clyde W. Barrow, Bradley Macdonald, Daniel O’Connor, Andrew Scerri, Robert Kirsch, Isaac Kamola, Lucrecia Garcia Iommi, and Nikol Alexander-Floyd, see, Caucus for a New Political Science & APSA Organized Section (NPS), “Coordinating Council Pre-APSA Meeting, Tuesday, September 21, 2021, 1:00–2:00 PM (Via Zoom).” Copy in author’s possession.

93 Ibid.

94 New Political Science, “Annual Business Meeting, held at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Thursday, September 23, 2021, 12:00–100 PM (Pacific),” 3. Copy in author’s possession.

95 Email from Clyde W. Barrow to Nancy S. Love, Re: Name Change, October 27, 2021 3:30 PM.

Additional information

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Clyde W. Barrow

Clyde W. Barrow is Chair and Professor of Political Science at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His most recent books are The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat (University of Michigan Press, 2020) and Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas-Miliband Debate After Globalization (SUNY Press, 2016). He is a former Chair (2009–2013) and Treasurer (2015–2020) of the Caucus for a New Political Science. He is currently a member of the journal’s Editorial Board (2011–present) and Co-Convenor of the CCPS Biennial Conference (2017–2023).