The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Political Science^*

^*This is a revised and expanded version of an earlier article published as Barrow, Clyde, W. “The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture 30:2 (2008), pp. 215–244.

Abstract

In 1967, the burgeoning discontent of many political scientists culminated in the establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science. The Caucus included political scientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it was united methodologically by a critique of behavioralism and by the idea that political science should abandon the myth of a value-free science. This article reviews the political and intellectual origins of New Political Science by examining some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970s purporting to establish the foundations of a new political science. It concludes that new political science originated as a methodological critique of behavioralism, an empirical critique of pluralist theory, and a sociological critique of the relationship between political science and political power. However, by 1979, after a decade of organizational insurgency and conflict with the APSA, these strands of thought fused into a critique of capitalist society, while its methodological critique of political science was transformed into a commitment to socialist politics.

The growing discontent amongst a minority of political scientists in the 1960s led to the establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) at the 1967 meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The original Constitution of the Caucus for a New Political Science states that it was organized “to help make the study of politics relevant to the struggle for a better world.”¹ While the Caucus includes political scientists of many diverse viewpoints, it is united by the idea that the discipline should abandon “the myth of a value-free science” and openly advance a progressive political agenda.² While originally founded as an alternative Caucus to the APSA, it soon sought additional, official recognition as the first organized section of the APSA with the right to sponsor its own panels, collect membership dues, and publish its own journal New Political Science.

In 2000, many of the same discontents that had led a previous generation of political scientists to organize the Caucus resurfaced in the “perestroika rebellion,” which denounced the APSA as an organization controlled by “East Coast Brahmins” and one that promotes a “narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches.”³ In the wake of the Perestroika rebellion, CNPS membership roughly doubled over the next five years, but aside from a vague discontent with the existing discipline and its professional association, it is still not likely that many members of the CNPS today can actually articulate a concept of new political science.⁴

This article examines the political and intellectual origins of New Political Science by reviewing some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970s that sought to establish and clarify the foundations of new political science. It concludes that new political science was originated as a methodological critique of behavioralism, an empirical critique of pluralist theory, and a sociological critique of the relation between political science and political power. However, by 1979, after a decade of organizational insurgency and conflict with the APSA, these strands of thought fused into a critique of capitalist society, while its methodological critique of political science was transformed into a commitment to socialist politics.

Political Science as Behavioralism

It is now recognized that the “behavioral revolution” of the 1950s was actually the Thermidor phase of a disciplinary paradigm shift that had begun as far back as the 1920s,⁵ when Charles E. Merriam (1925) a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, called for a new political science based on the observation of real governments and political behavior as opposed to one based on normative speculation.⁶ The behavioralists broke with the earlier practice of political scientists by claiming to have discovered a “value-neutral” political science and by viewing all earlier works on politics as merely a storehouse of hypotheses for empirical falsification or verification.⁷ Behavioralism’s main methodological claim was that uniformities in political behavior could be discovered and expressed as nomothetic generalizations, but that such generalizations must be empirically tested against observed behavior, such as voting or decision-making.⁸

The behavioral revolution was advanced in the United States largely under the aegis of systems analysis and pluralist theory. Talcott Parsons, who brought systems analysis into the social sciences, identified “the political system” with individual and collective behaviors that provide a center of integration for all aspects of the social system.⁹ David Easton, who played a major role in initiating the behavioral revolution in political science, rejected the fundamental concepts of earlier political scientists by declaring that “neither the state nor power is a concept that serves to bring together political research.”¹⁰ In urging political scientists to abandon the analysis of state and power, Easton proposed that scholars study a political system defined as “those interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for a society.”¹¹ The central focus of such an analysis would be to understand how “decision-making” (that is, authoritative allocations of values) allows systems to persist in a state of equilibrium.

However, in accounting for the equilibrium of political systems, Easton claimed that one had to assume they successfully generate two system outputs: (1) the political system must be able to allocate values for a society (that is, decision-making and authority) and (2) the political system must induce most members of a society to accept these allocations as binding most of the time (that is, legitimacy).¹² At this point, behavioralism and systems analysis were closely intertwined with various theories of authority, but most notably to pluralist theory, which views decision-making as the outcome of bargaining and conflict between interest groups in society.¹³

The significance of pluralist theory is that it seemed to explain how the political system induces most citizens to accept decisions as binding most of the time. Robert A. Dahl, who was certainly one of the single most important proponents of pluralist theory pointed out that pluralist theory assumes:

... that there are a number of loci for arriving at political decisions...business men, trade unions, politicians, consumers, farmers, voters, and many other aggregates all have an impact on policy outcomes; that none of these aggregates is homogeneous for all purposes; that each of them is highly influential over some scopes but weak over many others; and that the power to reject undesired alternatives is more common than the power to dominate over outcomes directly.¹⁴

Importantly, pluralists asserted that these political conditions prevail because key resources, such as wealth, force, status, and knowledge are, if not equally distributed, at least widely diffused amongst a plurality of competing groups in society. This purported pattern of “dispersed inequalities” means that no one group controls a disproportionate share of all key resources, while all groups in society possess some key resources. These dispersed inequalities insure that no one group dominates the political process (that is, authoritative decision-making), while no group is completely powerless within that process. In the view of many pluralists scholars, journalists, and public officials, the Western consensus on pluralist democracy and managed capitalism—namely, the Keynesian welfare state—was so complete that democratic politics had reached “the end of ideology.”¹⁵

However, the worldwide political upheavals of 1968 called into question the dominant assumptions of academic social science at precisely the moment when behavioralists were celebrating their triumph at meetings of the social science disciplinary associations. The idea that Western political systems had achieved system equilibrium through pluralist democracy and managed capitalism literally went up in smoke on university campuses and in the streets of those very countries.¹⁶ The Tet Offensive fueled increasing worldwide resistance to American military involvement in Vietnam, while the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia simultaneously plunged Communism into an ideological crisis that further eroded its declining image as a viable alternative to capitalism. At the same time, an accelerating nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union fueled an anti-nuclear movement in all of the Western countries.

In France, the May Days of 1968 brought an entire nation to a standstill, caused the DeGaulle government to temporarily flee the country, and left the French Communist Party in disgrace after its refusal to assume control of a provisional government. There were increasingly violent confrontations between students and police in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Mexico. In Japan, students joined farmers in violent resistance to the land takings necessary to construct Narita International Airport outside Tokyo. Meanwhile, homespun left-wing terrorist groups, such as the Red Army Faction (Germany), the Red Brigades (Italy), and the Weather Underground (US), splintered from these larger movements to launch domestic bombing campaigns against military, corporate, and government installations, and to plot assassination and kidnapping attempts on government and corporate officials. Meanwhile, a “cultural revolution” was underway in China.

Finally, a series of urban riots in Harlem (1964), Watts (1965), Chicago (1966), Newark (1967), and Detroit (1967) culminated with the Kerner Commission’s finding that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The commission’s seven month investigation found evidence that urban riots were not the result of “Communist subversion,” but the effect of overt racial discrimination, chronic poverty, high unemployment, poor schools, inadequate housing, lack of access to health care, and systematic police bias and brutality.¹⁷ Soon after the US Government’s own investigators reached these conclusions, Robert F. Kennedy, a US presidential candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, and Martin Luther King, the preeminent leader of the US civil rights movement were both assassinated in the same year. In the wake of historical political events that overtly contravened the fundamental assumptions of systems analysis and pluralist theory, as well as the objectivist ideals of the behavioral revolution, the discipline of political science was being unmasked as Establishment ideology, rather than autonomous social science.¹⁸

The Idea of a New Political Science

The Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) was established at the 1967 meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) amidst the escalating political turmoil in the United States and abroad.¹⁹ The CNPS was initially the brainchild of H. Mark Roelofs, a professor of political science at New York University and Christian Bay, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta. Roelofs was educated at Amherst College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied history, philosophy, religion, and politics. He had authored The Tension of Citizenship (1957) and The Language of Modern Politics (1967).²⁰ Roelof’s (2004) works drew attention to a “distinction between America’s mythic tradition of (Protestant) social democracy–by which we legitimize ourselves as a nation–and our ideological (bourgeois) tradition of liberal democracy–by which we organize ourselves for practical governance.”²¹ He describes his conclusions as “pessimistic: cyclically, we will endlessly hope–and as endlessly fail.”²² However, the late 1960s was a period of mythic hope.

Christian Bay was best known for his book The Structure of Freedom (1958), which proved so influential in the discipline that it was reprinted in 1965 (with a new preface) and again in 1970.²³ Bay’s book was one of the earliest critiques of the behavioral persuasion, particularly as manifested in systems analysis.²⁴ Bay argued that the objective of political science and political sociology should not be to identify the functional needs of social systems, but to identify and promote “the uses of social science for libertarian aims.”²⁵ Thus, Bay’s critique of systems analysis contained a barely concealed criticism of political scientists and political sociologists who elevated the abstract needs of the existing social and political system above the needs of actually existing persons. Bay made this critique explicit in a controversial article in the American Political Science Review (APSR), entitled “Politics and Pseudopolitics,” which documents in meticulous detail how “much of the current work on political behavior generally fails to articulate its very real value biases, and that the political impact of this supposedly neutral literature is generally conservative and in a special sense anti-political.”²⁶ In a reprint of The Structure of Freedom published in the same year, Bay admonished his colleagues that:

the political scientist should feel responsible for articulating his own values, and for structuring as explicitly as possible the totality of his own commitment ... As a political scientist he merely owes it to himself and to his audience to make it as clear as he can where he stands with respect to those fundamental issues of politics that are relevant to each.²⁷

This theme was elaborated at greater length in a book edited by Charles A. McCoy (Lehigh University) and John Playford (Monash University), entitled Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (1967), which pulled together several previously published essays by Christian Bay, James Petras, Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Todd Gitlin, Steven Lukes, and many others.²⁸ Although published just prior to the actual founding of the CNPS, the book’s critique of behavioralist methodology and pluralist theory became an intellectual rallying point for members of the CNPS, who embraced the book as an early manifesto of the new political science.²⁹

Apolitical Politics was certainly not the first book to point out the methodological limits of behavioralism, nor was it the first to question the behavioralist ideal of a value-free political science.³⁰ Yet, in contrast to the new Caucusistas, who identified inherent conceptual and methodological limitations to behavioralism, mainstream behavioralists remained convinced that there were no “‘natural limits’ to the behavioral analysis of politics.”³¹ Heinz Eulau, for example, declared that the only limits to the application of behavioral methodology were “technological ones” and that “as technology advances, the range of phenomena amenable to scientific analysis also expands. Therefore, it is really impossible to say that the data of politics are such that they cannot be harnessed by any scientific methods and techniques.”³²

At another extreme were many political philosophers, particularly Leo Strauss and his followers, who simply dismissed behavioralism. In lamenting the decline of political theory, Alfred Cobban suggested as early as 1953 that “the degree of moral disinterestedness possible in natural science is impossible in the field of political theory.”³³ He dismissed behavioralism as “the study of technique,” rather than politics and derided it as “a device, invented by university teachers, for avoiding that dangerous subject of politics, without achieving science.”³⁴

However, the most influential early critique of the behavioral school by political philosophers was a collection of Straussian essays edited by Herbert J. Storing, Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1962).³⁵ The Straussian critique created a stir in the APSR by asserting the now commonplace Straussian axiom that “political science is identical with political philosophy” and therefore, as Storing concluded, the behavioralists’ focus on “how to study politics succeeds only in diverting us from the study of it.”³⁶ However, as behavioralists’ tightened their stranglehold on the discipline through control of the APSA’s official positions, the APSR editorial board, and Social Science Research Council grants, they could easily ignore such criticism as sour grapes.³⁷

However, for both intellectual and political reasons, the critiques in Apolitical Politics could not be so easily dismissed by behavioralists in the academic establishment. While Strauss castigated American political scientists for their commitment to liberal democracy—one that was shared by most behavioralists—McCoy and Playford described their book as one that “may be properly described as a ‘liberal’ critique of behavioralism’s conservative ideological assumptions.”³⁸ Hence, the normative basis of the Caucus critique was a commitment to democratic values that were well within the American academic and popular mainstream.

Similarly, the editors of Apolitical Politics did not reject the scientific study of politics, as did the Straussians, but agreed with behavioralists that American political scientists had “been unduly preoccupied with the philosophic, legalistic, or descriptive treatment of political institutions.”³⁹ In contrast to the Straussians, the contributors to Apolitical Politics believed that behavioralism had a great deal to contribute to political science through its rigorous application of scientific method, its insistence on the importance of theory-building, and its willingness to draw on findings from other disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and economics. However, they also pointed out that the contemporary generation of behavioralists had become methodological extremists, who made unsupportable claims that went far beyond those made by behavioralism’s founders, such as Charles Merriam, V.O. Key, and Harold Lasswell.⁴⁰ The contemporary generation of behavioralists, while invoking these founders’ names, systematically ignored the caveats of those same scholars, particularly their explicit normative commitment to improving democracy.

Charles E. Merriam (1925), who is generally acknowledged as a founder of the behavioral movement, observed that the application of statistical measurement to political behavior and governmental processes was “one of the great opportunities of modern political science, especially in the United States,” but he also acknowledged “fundamental problems regarding the possibilities and limitations of quantitative method in dealing with social phenomena.”⁴¹ Consequently, Merriam concludes “it is not to be assumed that the quantitative study of government will supersede analysis of other types, either now or perhaps at any time.”⁴² Harold Lasswell also stressed the need for using “appropriate” quantitative methodologies, but as supplements to historical, institutional, and philosophical approaches, which in combination would produce “authentic information and responsible interpretations” of the policy process.⁴³ Lasswell did not argue that policy scholars should rely exclusively on quantitative data and quantitative analysis, nor did he argue that empirical research was confined to the highly statistical techniques that are now sometimes criticized as hyper-quantitative and that result in social science journals which look more like texts in advanced mathematics than social science. Lasswell always reminded readers that qualitative data of the sort that can be collected through key informant interviews, focus groups, government documents, foundation reports, government statistics, and even journalistic accounts of policy formation are all “empirical” forms of observation. Eulau and others, despite acknowledging Harold Lasswell as “a continuing source of stimulation” blithely ignored Lasswell’s caveat about appropriate quantification.⁴⁴

Similarly, as McCoy and Playford pointed out, the late V.O. Key, “while regarded by many as a behavioralist, never allowed himself to be dominated by his methodology. In fact, his greatness becomes apparent precisely where he leaves the narrow confines of his empirical data.”⁴⁵ In this sense, new political science was reaffirming Harold D. Lasswell’s call for a policy science that was empirical, applied, and normative in the sense that Lasswell expected policy scientists to conduct research that was not only immediately useful to decision-makers, but that would support and sustain democratic government by making it more informed and effective. Thus, McCoy and Playford agreed with Lasswell that “real knowledge of the political world is practical knowledge” and, therefore, “political research must address itself to real problems in their real settings, even if this involves a sacrifice of methodological precision … political science must be political as well as scientific.”⁴⁶

In a similar vein, Christian Bay decried the current state of the political science discipline as making:

no sense at all, with neo-Aristotelian philosophers [i.e., Straussians] disdainful of empirical inquiry on one side of the gulf, confronted with logical positivist behavioralists who shy away from any and all normative commitments on the other side. To make matters worse, communications across the chasm at times suggest the existence of two enemy camps, not two kinds of scholars with complementary contributions to make toward a common objective.⁴⁷

The essays in Apolitical Politics developed a systematic critique of behavioralism that focused on three major concerns that were collectively designated “the behavioral syndrome.”⁴⁸ First, the writings of behavioralists were characterized by “conservatism” in the sense that they always implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, celebrated the American economic, social, and political status quo. In 1959, C. Wright Mills had called attention to “the unexamined conservatism and scientific pretensions of The Behavioral Scientists” and it was this observation that inspired the new political scientists to expose those hidden assumptions through a detailed analysis of behavioralist writings.⁴⁹ In challenging the behavioralists’ claim to be doing objective value-free political science, they were also challenging the fact/value distinction that supplied the philosophical foundation for an apolitical political science, because in its claim to be apolitical, behavioralism was nonetheless profoundly implicated in politics by providing an ideological defense of the existing order.

Second, behavioralist writings consistently conveyed a fear of popular democracy by rationalizing the non-participation of non-elites in decision-making and even justified widespread non-voting as necessary to the maintenance of system equilibrium (cf. Bachrach 1967).⁵⁰ As McCoy and Playford observe:

the behavioralists have not only shown that the concept of democracy developed by the classical theorists such as Mills is not translated into practice in the major Western democracies; they have also shown themselves to be not unhappy about these results of their empirical research. They are opposed to any massive extension of democratic participation in the political process. They favor the maintenance of the present low-level of citizenship involvement, and this they justify partly on the grounds that mass democracy, mass movements and high-level participation are to be feared as first steps toward a totalitarian order and partly on grounds that popular democracy is unmanageable and chaotic.⁵¹ (See also, Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, pp. 369–70).

Third, behavioralist research emphasized arcane methodological principles, models, and elaborate data collection techniques, while avoiding vital political issues, such as racial and gender inequality, labor strife, poverty, and the sources of imperial warfare.⁵² In this respect, the behavioralists were apolitical as even V.O. Key had recognized in pointing out that “a considerable proportion of the literature commonly classified under the heading ‘political behavior’ has no real bearing on politics, or at least that its relevance has not been made apparent.”⁵³ The behavioral focus on individual behavior, system equilibrium, and methodological technique was blinding political scientists to real political developments, such as the civil rights movement, the student movement, the poor peoples’ movement, anti-war movement, and the anti-nuclear movement, which were all gathering steam by the mid-1960s.

The behavioralists routinely selected research topics not on the basis of any criteria of political significance, but rather on criteria determined by their methodology and particularly on whether a “rich data base” was available that would allow the use of ever more sophisticated quantitative techniques. Behavioralists had become prisoners of a methodology that led to scholarly work that was increasingly sophisticated in its use of new technologies and statistical techniques, but simultaneously it was becoming more “trivial, narrow, and apolitical” in the way it avoided contemporary social problems.⁵⁴

Although the focus of Apolitical Politics was a philosophical critique of behavioralist methodology, it also included several essays that exemplified the empirical and conceptual limitations of that methodology as it had been operationalized in pluralist-oriented community power research.⁵⁵ An essay by Shin’ya Ono on “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism” defended C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite as “the most forceful criticism of the pluralist model of the power structure.”⁵⁶ However, as with many of the new political scientists, Ono also considered Dahl’s⁵⁷ standing demand for empirical verifiability a valid one and agreed that Mills had partially failed the test of empirical verifiability by failing to document a well-defined power elite and particularly by failing to “examine the dynamics of the decision-making process with reference to concrete sets of ‘key issues.’”⁵⁸ Thus, Ono proposed that new political scientists meet Dahl’s challenge with additional empirical research and, of course, many of them such as G. William Domhoff and Ralph Miliband were already at work implementing this empirical research agenda.⁵⁹

However, Apolitical Politics also reprinted Peter Bachrach’s and Morton Baratz’s earlier essay on the “Two Faces of Power,” which suggested that a fundamental limitation of the behavioral concept of power is the assumption that “power is totally embodied and fully reflected in ‘concrete decisions’ or in activity bearing directly upon their making.”⁶⁰ Bachrach and Baratz drew on E.E. Schattschneider’s concept of “mobilization of bias,” which suggests that every political system mobilizes bias in the form of dominant values, cultural symbols, political myths and rituals, and institutional processes. The mobilization of bias in a political system inherently facilitates the organization of some issues into politics, while organizing other issues out of politics.⁶¹ By ignoring these selective mechanisms: pluralists begged the question of power by taking the “key issues” decided by elected officials as given, when the theoretically more important form of power was non-decision-making, that is, the ability to keep issues off the political agenda.⁶² To overcome this analytical shortcoming, Bachrach and Baratz proposed an alternative method for studying non-decision-making that would start with a detailed examination of the specific selective mechanisms that mobilize bias in particular political communities to determine their differential impact on the relative power position of different groups. The researcher:

… would make a careful inquiry into which persons or groups, if any, gain from the existing bias and which, if any, are handicapped by it. Next, he would investigate the dynamics of non-decision-making; that is, he would examine the extent to which and the manner in which status quo oriented persons and groups influence those community values and those political institutions (as e.g., the unanimity ‘rule’ of New York City’s Board of Estimate) which tend to limit the scope of actual decision-making to ‘safe’ issues. Finally, using his knowledge of the restrictive face of power as a foundation of analysis and as a standard for distinguishing between ‘key’ and ‘routine’ political decisions, the research would, after the manner of the pluralists, analyze the participation in decision-making of concrete issues.⁶³

Thus, a new critical political science was putting forward a methodological critique of behavioralism, while proposing a critical and empirical research agenda with the potential to yield results with normative implications that diverged drastically from those of the apolitical behavioralists. However, this idea of a new political science would almost instantaneously become an organizational struggle within the American Political Science Association (APSA).

The Idea as Organization

The spark which ignited the Caucus for a New Political Science was the official rejection or tabling of several resolutions introduced at the 6 September 1967 business meeting of the APSA convention in Chicago.⁶⁴ The most contentious of these resolutions involved Article II of the APSA Constitution, which states that the association “will not commit its members on questions of public policy nor take positions not immediately concerned with its direct purpose,” which is “to encourage the study of Political Science.”⁶⁵ Article II was invoked by APSA officials to prevent the introduction or discussion of various “political” resolutions asking the APSA to take positions on contemporary public policy issues such as the Vietnam War. This consternation was elevated by the favorable vote on an interim report on the ethical problems of academic political scientists that, according to Christian Bay, “had managed to bring up almost every conceivable ethical issue but the ones at hand, and to conclude with wholly non-committal recommendations.”⁶⁶ Moreover, in conducting the meeting, microphones had been placed on the podium so that APSA officials could address the audience, but no microphones were made available to the audience for purposes of public discussion and deliberation. Christian Bay decried the meeting as one that “bordered on the grotesque.”⁶⁷

As word spread of “the Association’s unconcern for the political anxieties of the contemporary world,” the Caucus emerged within 36 hours as a “spontaneous and wholly unpremeditated” event.⁶⁸ The Caucus for a New Political Science was organized in a series of three meetings, each double the size of the preceding meeting, which culminated with the election of a thirteen member Executive Committee, the adoption of an official name, and a membership list of approximately 225 persons. H. Mark Roelofs was elected chairman; Charles A. McCoy as vice-chairman; Paul Minkoff (Brooklyn College), treasurer; and Anna Navarro (Princeton University), secretary.⁶⁹

The Caucus for a New Political Science passed several resolutions including one that asked the APSA Program Committee to devote a full day of the 1968 convention to a discussion of the Vietnam War; a second resolution asking the APSA to poll the Association’s full membership on their attitudes toward the war; and a third resolution calling on the APSA to resist efforts by the House Un-American Affairs Committee to obtain membership lists of campus organizations.⁷⁰ These overtures were all rejected by the APSA officialdom, although it was agreed that more papers and panels would be devoted to the Vietnam War the next year. However, the so-called Resolution 1 and Resolution 5 were considered “the major resolutions” of the 1967 convention, because they established the purpose and mission of the Caucus for a New Political Science. The resolutions read as follows:

Resolution 1

Whereas the American Political Science Association, at its conventions and in its journal, has consistently failed to study, in a radically critical spirit, either the great crises of the day or the inherent weaknesses of the American political system, be it resolved that this caucus promote a new concern in the Association for our great social crises and a new and broader opportunity for us all to fulfill, as scholars, our obligations to society and to science.⁷¹

Resolution 5

Be it resolved that one of the primary concerns of the Caucus be to stimulate research in areas of political science that are of crucial importance and that have been thus far ignored. ⁷²

Christian Bay publicly suggested that “if the APSA cannot be moved” it might be necessary to create a “new Society for the Study of Political Problems, for those of us who want to get out from under the wings of our own establishment.”⁷³ At the same time, the CNPS executive committee “stressed that the Caucus for a New Political Science is a group within the Association” so it is worth noting that Christian Bay was not amongst the original officers or executive committee members of the Caucus for a New Political Science.⁷⁴ Indeed, while Christian Bay proposed a resolution for the 1968 APSA convention to rescind Article II outright,⁷⁵ the CNPS executive committee proposed a more moderate resolution that would merely amend Article II to allow the Association to actively encourage “in its membership and in its journal, research in and concern for significant contemporary political and social problems, however controversial and subject to partisan discourse in the community at large these may be.”⁷⁶

Similarly, the CNPS made plans for a series of panels at the 1968 convention that would deal with topics such as whether the 1968 elections offered meaningful choices; race, power, and money; the creation of “news”; Vietnam and American foreign policy; and new modes of radical political thought and action in America. While fully consistent with the CNPS’s purpose and mission, the leadership emphasized that these panels were “designed to supplement” the APSA program and “to expand it in the direction of greater relevance to the political problems of the day.” The Caucus’s panels were “in no way supposed to conflict with or hamper the program planned by the regular committees of the Association.”⁷⁷

However, as John Dryzek points out: “Resistance from the now mostly behavioralist APSA hierarchy could be fierce.”⁷⁸ While the Association’s officers did agree to start publishing PS as a forum for discussing issues within the political science discipline, the panels proposed by the Caucus were frozen out of the official program, where not a single panel at the annual meeting “addressed the pressing issues which were galvanizing millions of people” in the US and throughout the world.⁷⁹ Consequently, the Caucus set up its own program with the theme of “American Democracy in Crisis,” and sponsored panels on race and the urban riots and the 1968 rebellions in Chicago, Czechoslovakia, and Columbia University. The CNPS panels had such large turnouts that Caucus organizers were more convinced than ever that “many political scientists were ready to move in the direction initiated by the CNPS.”⁸⁰ The second APSA convention with a Caucus presence ended with the CNPS membership list more than doubling to over five hundred persons—about fourteen percent of the 3723 persons attending the conference, but only four percent of total APSA membership.⁸¹ The Caucus instructed its new 21-member executive committee to set up study commissions on the role of non-whites and women in the profession, graduate education, conference programming, and to investigate the possibility of publishing its own journal.⁸²

The following year the APSA leadership adopted a more conciliatory stance. The APSA’s Executive Director, Evron M. Kirkpatrick, began distributing the Association’s annual report to the entire membership for the first time in 1969, including information on membership and conference participation. Kirkpatrick announced that “the Association continues to seek greater involvement by its members in the programs and activities” of the APSA, while noting that over two hundred members already served on various committees of the Association that govern and advise on Association programs and act as liaisons to other scholarly organizations and government agencies.⁸³ David Easton, the newly elected president of the APSA, agreed to allow some Caucus panels as part of the official program beginning with the 1969 APSA convention. However, no one was prepared for Easton, the high priest of the behavioral revolution in political science, to echo many of the concerns expressed by the Caucus in his APSA presidential address, where he declared that:

A new revolution is under way in American political science. The last revolution—behavioralism—has scarcely been completed before it has been overtaken by the increasing social and political crises of our time. The weight of these crises is being felt within our discipline in the form of a new conflict in the throes of which we now find ourselves. This new and latent challenge is directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy … The initial impulse of this revolution is just being felt. Its battle cries are relevance and action.⁸⁴

Nevertheless, the new Caucus was gaining steam and its members were not mollified by Easton’s gesture. In that same year, Alan Wolfe, a young Caucus firebrand, published an article in the Antioch Review documenting the APSA’s “oligarchic yet apolitical character.”⁸⁵ He effectively applied the same method of power structure analysis deployed in the critique of pluralism to map out the APSA’s internal power structure and to hold it up as an example of the discipline’s apolitical politics, where not a single Association office was ever contested by anyone from outside this academic establishment.

Wolfe argued that a few conference panels at the APSA convention were not sufficient gains.⁸⁶ The Caucus needed to run its own slate of candidates for APSA offices “as a way of demonstrating alternative approaches to the discipline.” Wolfe and many of his young colleagues insisted that a new political science “demanded both intellectual and organizational reform” and that consequently democracy should be extended “to the APSA where contested elections were unknown.”⁸⁷ Following Wolfe’s advice, the CNPS ran a full slate of Caucusistas in 1969 that for the first time in APSA history challenged the nominees of the official Nominating Committee, which historically had put forward only one name for each Association office.

The CNPS nominated Christian Bay for president. It nominated David Kettler, H. Mark Roelofs, and Alan Wolfe for the three vice-presidential positions. Henry S. Kariel and Lewis Lipsitz amongst others were nominated for the APSA Executive Council (see Table 1). Kariel and Lipsitz were also nominated by the APSA Nominating Committee, which led to the formation of a third group in the 1969 election, which called itself the Ad Hoc Committee for a Representative Slate. The latter was chaired by Donald G. Herzberg of the Eagleton Institute.

Table 1. 1969 American political science association election.

President	Endorsement				Votes	Percent
Robert E. Lane*		PS	AH		5198	66
Christian Bay	C				2609	33
Vice-president
Grant McConnell*		PS	AH		5336	68
William Riker*		PS	AH		5259	67
Robert E. Ward*		PS	AH		4932	63
David Kettler	C				2412	31
H. Mark Roelofs	C				2383	30
Alan Wolfe	C				2370	30
Secretary
Thomas Dye*		PS	AH		5415	69
Minkoff	C				2235	28
Treasurer
Rourke*		PS	AH		5213	66
Clarke	C				2489	32
Council—2 Year Term
Prestage	C	PS	AH	BC	5852	74
Samuel Huntington*		PS	AH		5400	69
Salisbury*		PS	AH		5067	64
Herbert McClosky*			AH		5050	64
Kessel*		PS	AH		4819	61
Alan Sindler*			AH		4726	60
Waldron*		PS	AH		4224	54
Henry S. Kariel*	C	PS			3671	47
Lewis Lipsitz	C	PS			3625	46
Elden					2910	37
Becker	C				2696	33
William E. Connolly	C				2569	33
Greene	C				2501	32
Gottfried	C				2427	31
Council—1 Year Term
Johnson*	C		AH	BC	6257	80

Notes: C = Caucus for a New Political Science; PS = Nominating Committee of the APSA; AH = Ad Hoc Committee for a Representative Slate; BC 0  = Black Caucus.

Source: Mueller, “The Political Scientist Decides,” p. 312.

^* Elected.

As a result of this unprecedented situation, it was decided at the annual meeting to conduct the election by mail and to engage the American Arbitration Association to administer the election. The ballots were mailed to the Association’s 13,061 members with statements of belief and biographies for each of the candidates.⁸⁸ However, before the ballots arrived at members’ offices, Herzberg sent a letter to every APSA member on behalf of the Ad Hoc Committee asking them to cast Executive Council votes for Herbert McCloskey (University of California, Berkeley) and Alan Sindler (Cornell University) instead of Henry Kariel and Lewis Lipsitz. Herzberg argued that it was only after the Nominating Committee had endorsed Kariel and Lipsitz that the two pledged “to serve in the Association as representatives of the Caucus.” McCloskey and Sindler were held up as “scholars of high competence and achievement,” while Kariel and Lipsitz, despite their own scholarly accomplishments, were denounced as “Members of the Executive Committee of the Caucus for a New Political Science.” In contrast to the Caucus, which “advocates the full-scale politicization of the Association and the use of its resources to advance a political action program,” the Ad Hoc Committee wanted “to maintain the Association as a non-partisan professional organization devoted to shared professional purposes.” It was their view that “this election will determine whether the Association is to be a professional organization based on shared interests and expertise in scholarship, research, and teaching or whether it is to become a political action group.”⁸⁹

The Herzberg letter provoked a response from James Prothro (University of North Carolina), who sent a letter to political science departments in October of 1969 “to defend the professional reputations of Lewis Lipsitz (University of North Carolina) and Henry Kariel (University of Hawaii).”⁹⁰ Prothro informed readers that the:

Nominating Committee knew the Caucus intended to offer nominations for the Council and was obviously aware that Lipsitz and Kariel might well receive the nomination of the Caucus … Lipsitz and Kariel were nominated as competent political scientists first and not as ‘ambassadors’ of the Caucus.⁹¹

The irony was not lost on him that a group who claimed to oppose the politicization of the APSA “has the same effect … as the kind of last minute smear tactic associated with the dirtiest level of ward politics.”⁹²

In the end, Christian Bay won thirty three percent of the vote, while Robert E. Lane won the election with sixty six percent. The Caucus’s candidates for vice-president, secretary, and treasurer lost by similar margins. Kariel was elected to the Executive Council, but the Ad Hoc Committee was successful in electing McCloskey and Sindler, which was sufficient to keep Lipsitz off the Council (see Table 1). The following year, the CNPS nominated Hans Morgenthau, who opposed the Vietnam War, as its candidate for APSA president. Morgenthau captured forty three percent of the votes cast in 1970.⁹³

In response, the APSA Nominating Committee endorsed Christian Bay for the Executive Council the following year and with official support he was the only CNPS nominee to win a position in that election. Moreover, after three consecutive elections in what amounted to a new multi-party system in the APSA, and which now included endorsements by the newly formed Women’s Caucus, a veritable cottage industry sprang into being as behavioral political scientists put their tools to work analyzing voting patterns in APSA elections. The studies found remarkably little straight ticket voting amongst APSA members.⁹⁴ Consequently, an analysis of the 1971 election by Bernard Grofman concludes “that given present voting patterns,” CNPS nominees could never be elected unless they were simultaneously endorsed by either the APSA Nominating Committee or the Ad Hoc Committee.⁹⁵ Thus, he advised the political science establishment that “as long as the Ad Hoc Committee and APSA combine forces, it would appear that the Caucus can be frozen out, except for such nominees as are ‘given’ it by the APSA Nominating Committee.”⁹⁶

The Organization as Radical Idea

In the midst of this organizational upheaval, new political science took a more radical turn when the movement’s shifting leadership released a second book co-edited by Marvin Surkin, an assistant professor of political science at Adelphi University (and an original member of the CNPS Executive Committee), and Alan Wolfe, an assistant professor of political science at Old Westbury College (SUNY). The book, entitled An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (1970) was a collection of essays by newly prominent members of the CNPS, which proclaimed the end of political science as it was currently taught and practiced in the United States. According to the editors:

To change political science will require a critique of the current [behavioral-pluralist] paradigm and the development of alternative modes of research, theory, and social practice. The only way this is possible is by ending the hegemony of political science over its students … In short, because the only political science permitted in America today is that defined and determined within the existing paradigm, and because only those ‘responsible’ critics who are content to remain within the established pluralistic mold are tolerated, we conclude that the only option now available to critics and reformers is an end to political science.⁹⁷

In contrast to Apolitical Politics, the essays in “The Caucus Papers” were largely authored by newly minted assistant professors working at the periphery of the academic establishment, such as Marvin Surkin, Alan Wolfe, Michael Parenti, Matthew Crenson, David Underhill, and James Petras (associate professor). Many of the chapters previewed a wave of forthcoming books that were highly critical of the behavioral-pluralist paradigm and the political science discipline generally. The Caucus Papers continued the critique of behavioralist methodology, while deepening the critique of pluralist theory. It also extended that critique to the political science profession as Caucus leadership shifted from old liberals to young radicals and as frustration and conflict intensified with the APSA establishment. As opposed to the politely “liberal critique” advanced in Apolitical Politics, The Caucus Papers advanced a radical critique consisting of essays written primarily by self-proclaimed Marxists, socialists, and radical democrats.

By now, Caucusistas took the earlier critique of behavioralism as given, so while many of these arguments were reiterated in various contexts, the latest manifesto was more interested in documenting that while behavioralism claimed to be an “empirical” methodology, its application in pluralist studies actually “demonstrate behavioralism’s intellectual and political incapacity to come to terms” with social and political reality.⁹⁸ Thus, The Caucus Papers picked up where Apolitical Politics had left off, but its main targets were pluralist theory and the profession of political science, rather than epistemological and normative critiques of behavioralism.

The Critique of Pluralist Theory

New political scientists were now directing three types of critiques at the pluralists: immanent critiques, conceptual critiques, and the elaboration of theoretical alternatives. Parenti was hardly making a controversial statement in 1970 when he called pluralism “the new orthodoxy of American political science.”⁹⁹ Parenti focused his attention on Robert Dahl’s Who Governs?, which he considered “the most intelligent and important pluralist statement.”¹⁰⁰ Parenti developed an immanent critique of this paradigmatic work to demonstrate that if it were subjected to a more searching analysis by critics, Dahl (and others) frequently went to great lengths to verbally obfuscate and suppress their own empirical findings, which were often at odds with their ideological conclusions. By unraveling the contradictions between ideological statement and empirical fact, Parenti laid the foundation for a critique of power from below; namely, a concept of power developed from the point of view of the excluded, the oppressed, and the marginalized in American society.

The essence of Parenti’s immanent critique was that the pluralists employ “a double standard for the measurement of power.”¹⁰¹ One did not need to go outside their own published work to find that ideological considerations were biasing the interpretation of their empirical findings and leading them to make self-contradictory methodological pronouncements to interpret away the inconsistencies in their analysis of community power structure. For example, the New Haven investigation conducted by Robert Dahl (Yale), and his former student Nelson Polsby (Berkeley), both claimed that the city’s important decision-makers consisted of civic and political leaders clustered around the mayor and that only a few of these decision-makers were members of an economic elite.

Thus, according to Polsby, the only way to prove empirically that municipal authorities were under the power of an economic elite would be to document that: (1) members of the elite “customarily give orders to political and civic leaders,” which are then carried out by them; (2) members of the elite routinely and successfully block policies adverse to their interests; or (3) members of the elite place “their own people in positions of leadership.”¹⁰² Polsby argues that “If these events do not occur, then what grounds have we to suppose that the actor is powerful? There appears to be no scientific grounds for such an assumption.”¹⁰³ On these grounds, he dismissed scholars, who impute a high power potential to economic elites as “indulging in empirically unjustified speculation.”¹⁰⁴ The failure to examine decision-making as an empirically measurable form of behavior was the basis for dismissing earlier the radical scholarship of C. Wright Mills, Floyd Hunter, and Paul Sweezy.¹⁰⁵ Pluralists claimed that these radical analyses of power structures had at best demonstrated a high potential for capitalist elites to exercise power, while the works of Dahl and Polsby claimed to demonstrate that this potential was not in fact realized in the decision-making process.

However, these same pluralist analyses found that very few citizens actually engaged in any direct political, civic, or decision-making activity, while none of New Haven’s key decision-makers were drawn from either black or white lower-income groups.¹⁰⁶ Decision-makers were drawn primarily from professional, business, and higher income strata of the local community. Furthermore, it was recognized by pluralists that members of lower-strata groups did not participate directly in decision-making, nor did they customarily “give orders” to political and civic leaders that were then carried out by them. Neither did these groups routinely and successfully block policy initiatives adverse to their interests, nor did they place “their own people” in positions of leadership. Applying the same logic that pluralists applied to the economic elite, one might conclude that the poor and lower-classes did not exercise much, if any, power in local politics. This might lead one to ask why such large numbers of people, with evidently very little power potential, were excluded from the decision-making processes of an ostensibly pluralist democracy.

Yet, rather than draw the conclusion warranted by their own data—that the lower- and even working class strata of American cities did not exercise power—Dahl argued that these groups exercise “a moderate degree of indirect influence” through their power to elect officials.¹⁰⁷ When confronted with the fact that most Americans do not vote regularly in municipal elections, and that the less educated and less affluent are most likely to not vote, Dahl responded that the mass of non-voters in America could be imputed to exercise power through “influential contact” with neighbors, friends, and relatives who do vote.¹⁰⁸ However, such claims were readily dismissed with respect to the potential influence of economic elites over elected officials.

In addition, Dahl imputed a particularly important form of preemptive power to non-voters by asserting that “elected leaders keep the real or imagined preferences of constituents constantly in mind [italics added] in deciding what policies to adopt or reject.”¹⁰⁹ When confronted by the fact that most citizens rarely, if ever, use their political resources and, hence, never fully convert their potential influence into actual influence, Polsby dismissed such observations as an “inappropriate and arbitrary” effort to assign middle- and upper-class values of participation and civic engagement to the lower classes.¹¹⁰ He asserted that “most of the American communities studied in any detail seem to be relatively healthy political organisms” and thus there was no reason for concern.¹¹¹ According to Polsby, acquiescence, passivity, and conservatism were the norm of American Government, because most people were content. Only a year after he published these statements, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was in flames.

Parenti suggested:

that instead of declaring them [the lower classes] to be an unknown but contented entity, we allow ourselves the simple expedient of directly investigating the less privileged elements of a community to determine why they are not active, and what occurs when they do attempt to become active.¹¹²

As Parenti pointed out, academic studies of policy struggles involving lower-status groups were a rarity in American political science.¹¹³ Parenti proposed that we instead observe power “from the bottom up” as a way to correct the empirical shortcomings of pluralist ideology.¹¹⁴ The immanent critique of pluralism raised numerous theoretical questions about its conceptual and methodological limits. The most significant conceptual critiques involved efforts to operationalize the concepts of non-decision-making and preemption. Bachrach’s and Baratz’s 1962 APSR article on “Two Faces of Power” had been republished in Apolitical Politics (1968) and in William E. Connolly’s, The Bias of Pluralism, which made the concept of non-decision-making a standard article of faith for the new political science. However, in a preview of his forthcoming book on The Un-Politics of Air Pollution, Matthew Crenson offered the first glimpses in The Caucus Papers of how one could operationalize this concept empirically.¹¹⁵ Crenson suggested that more and more political analysts were beginning to acknowledge that “there is something to be learned from political inaction—from nonevents, nonissues, and nondecisions.”¹¹⁶ Crenson drew on comparative case studies of local air pollution policy, including the absence of policy, to illustrate how “the decision-making process [analyzed by pluralists] is one by which the winners of the political game are determined; non-decision-making helps determine what the game will be in the first place.”¹¹⁷ Crenson demonstrated in concrete detail how “the political issues that generate data for pluralist studies of local politics are the ones that have managed to pass through the filtering processes of non-decision-making.”¹¹⁸ However, the pluralists had never attempted “to account for the seemingly important decisions that are never made, or the seemingly critical issues that never arise.”¹¹⁹

However, non-decisions were still observable and often (though not always) involved a conscious decision to exclude or suppress a potential issue from the decision-making agenda.¹²⁰ However, it was hypothesized that many issues, and the groups affected by them, are excluded from the established decision-making process, because of what Crenson called industry’s “reputation for power” amongst political decision-makers.¹²¹ In his analysis of various public policies, Parenti also pointed to business’s “powers of pre-emption” to illustrate a key shortcoming of behavioralist methodology; namely, that pluralists failed to acknowledge “that corporate leaders often have no need to involve themselves in decision-making because sufficient anticipatory consideration is given to their interests by officeholders.”¹²² This idea had surfaced earlier in Shin’yo Ono’s essay in Apolitical Politics. Ono had challenged the behavioralist focus on observable decisions by noting that an elected official:

… may exclude a whole range of alternatives because he takes the existing socioeconomic structure as something ‘given.’ This act of excluding a whole range of alternatives need not be a result of political pressures, or of a telephone call from the ‘downtown magnates’; indeed, it need not even be a conscious act. That is, he may do this as a matter of course, as something which is a part of the ‘rules of the game.’ But can we deny that in this case the downtown magnates have exercised a significant degree of power in the decision-making process, perhaps merely by existing, and certainly by being protected by the ‘consensus’ or the ‘rules of the game’? To ignore this ‘silent’ and ‘unseen’ aspect of power (that is, the structure of power) is to obscure our perception of political reality.¹²³

Thus, by 1969–70, there was a growing sense of urgency amongst many new political scientists that it was time to move beyond “anti-pluralism” and the critique of behavioralism to a genuinely new political science. Surkin and Wolfe suggest that members of the CNPS were increasingly convinced that any effort to criticize and change the ideology of American society and to restructure its institutions and social relations would require “the development of new modes of radical political thought and action.”¹²⁴ Yet, by 1970, there were both “liberal” and “radical” theoretical alternatives competing to become the new political science.

Parenti observes that a liberal group of “anti-pluralists” were raising troubling questions about whether elites were mutually restrained by competitive interaction with other elites, as claimed by the theory of democratic elitism, or by pressure from the masses as claimed by many pluralists.¹²⁵ Henry S. Kariel and Grant McConnell argued that case studies of interest group influence over the policy process revealed that powerful interest groups did not compete against each other, but captured those sectors of the state and public policy that directly affected their special interest.¹²⁶ This process of parceling out governmental power to special interest groups meant that “pluralism” was incapable of achieving the public interest, because government decisions were controlled by private special interests for their own benefit. Special interest elites tended to predominate in particular spheres of government policy, where the automobile industry controlled transportation policy, agribusiness controlled agricultural subsidies, and the oil industry dominated energy policy. This strain of anti-pluralism was eventually identified most closely with Theodore Lowi’s “interest group liberalism,” which describes the actual functioning of interest groups in government as “a vulgarized version of the pluralist model.”¹²⁷

However, a more radical strain of thought accepted Dahl’s methodological challenge by claiming to prove empirically that the United States has an upper class and that the national government is dominated by this ruling capitalist class. Much of this work traced its origin to C. Wright Mills, who dismissed pluralist theory “as a set of images out of a fairy tale.”¹²⁸ In contrast to the pluralist model of group competition and dispersed inequalities, Mills argued that a tightly knit coalition of the corporate rich, military warlords, and a servile political directorate—a power elite—governed the United States. Mills claimed that:

The power elite is … in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.¹²⁹

G. William Domhoff, a political sociologist, began building on Mills’ observations, but also went beyond his theoretical claims by documenting in meticulous detail how a small corporate elite’s “control of corporations, foundations, elite universities, the Presidency, the federal judiciary, the military, and the CIA qualifies the American upper class as a ‘governing class’, especially in the light of the wealth owned and the income received by members of that exclusive social group.”¹³⁰ In a short time, however, power elite theory would morph into class analysis and Marxism with the publication of Ralph Miliband’s, The State in Capitalist Society.¹³¹ As with Domhoff, the theoretical power of Miliband’s analysis was that it did not sidestep a direct confrontation with mainstream social science, but established the necessity of a new political science through an immanent and empirical critique of pluralism and systems theory. Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society was not only amongst the most important books to empirically challenge pluralism during this time, at a theoretical level, it also returned the concept of the state to a prominent role in American political science.

The radical turn in new political science also extended the critique of pluralism from domestic to foreign policy. In The Caucus Papers, Surkin and Wolfe insisted that an analysis of American imperialism is “essential to an understanding of US policies,” while the dominant ideology of pluralist democracy was also running rampant in the international relations subfield.¹³² James Petras contributed an essay to The Caucus Papers that suggested the power structure of US imperialism operated remarkably similarly to the domestic power structure, because it emanated from the same capitalist elite. Petras analyzed US relations with Latin America to find that US foreign policy decisions were controlled by “linkage groups.” Linkage groups were networks of American investors, financiers, and business executives linked to foreign military officers who had been trained in the United States and who often do business in or with the United States, while depending on it for both economic and military support. At the same time, American business was able to exert “indirect influence” on foreign governments through its reputation for power and its real ability to withhold loans or credits or to manipulate import quotas for one-crop export dependent nations.¹³³

These works, and many others, established that a future new political science would need to develop a theory of class structure, a theory of the state, and a theory of imperialism, although as others would soon point out, it is also needed to theorize gender, race, ecology, and other forms of non-class identity and political action. However, many in the CNPS were convinced that forward movement in political science was blocked by the discipline’s formal organization. Networks of academic elites controlled access to teaching and research positions and there were even accusations that CNPS activists were black listed. The leading political science journals were controlled by a small group of behavioralists and major grant awards and internships were controlled by a behavioralist establishment linked financially, politically, and ideologically to corporate and political elites in the existing power structure. These concerns led to a new element in the NPS critique of the discipline, which involved not only Wolfe’s earlier dissection of the academic establishment, but the realization that many of those same political scientists were integrated into the existing national power structure.

Political Scientists and the Power Structure

The critique of behavioralism advanced in Apolitical Politics was carried forward by the more radical members of the CNPS. Surkin and Wolfe agreed with earlier critics that:

… pluralism reinforced a false sense of social reality among political scientists. This enabled political scientists to conclude that presidential nominating conventions were models of democratic procedure, that the Electoral College needed no reform, and that machine politics in Chicago under Mayor Daley gave the mass of the people the kind of government they seemed to want. In other words, the existing order was praised, little change was deemed necessary; in some cases it was even thought deleterious to the established system.¹³⁴

Moreover, it was widely agreed that pluralism “while being defended by political scientists, serves to reinforce a system experienced as dysfunctional and intransigent by other segments of society (including many organized groups) in regard to their demands and interests.”¹³⁵ In this respect, David Kettler observed, whether consciously or unconsciously, that political scientists “are among the prime contributors to the dominant ideology” and thus function to reproduce a social and political order that fails to represent the interests of ordinary citizens.¹³⁶

However, when the Ad Hoc Committee responded to the Caucus’s political activism inside the APSA by responding that it wanted “to maintain the Association as a non-partisan professional organization devoted to shared professional purposes,” it linked the organizational defense of behavioralism to the concept of professionalism. There were more than a few amongst the new political scientists who saw the long drift to behavioralism and pluralism as being linked to the professionalization of political science. Thus, the academic establishment’s response to the Caucus set off a multifaceted critique of professionalism. Wolfe observes that the historical definition of a profession is “a group of people whose expertise, fairness, and devotion were so unquestioned that decisions about who was to be admitted to the group could only be made by the group itself, privately, under special sanction from the state.”¹³⁷ For the most part, clergy, lawyers, and doctors were the classic exemplars of the professions with each developing a system of apprenticeships and qualification tests for membership in the profession. However, an essential element of the professions is an ethic of public service and, as Wolfe notes, their service to society was considered so important “that only they should have the right to determine entry” into the profession.¹³⁸

Political science claimed to be a profession, but opponents of the Caucus regarded political activity as unprofessional, whether inside the APSA, on campus, or in the community. The paradox of the behavioral revolution and its attendant scientism is that the concept of professionalism in political science was fused to the idea that “political science is a neutral, ‘pure’, science, not a body of expert and immediately applicable knowledge, like law or medicine.”¹³⁹ In fact, those subfields of the discipline, such as public administration and public policy, which emphasized immediately applicable knowledge of a type comparable to the classical professions, were marginalized by the behavioral quest for a pure science of politics and government. Thus, as Wolfe notes: “service to any clientele, an important part of the traditional professions, is not a salient characteristic of the social sciences” and thus any overt effort to forge political linkages of this type were considered unprofessional.¹⁴⁰ Official political scientists condemned political activity, or even political advocacy, as a violation of the profession’s code of scientific conduct—an activity that crosses the boundary of science into ideology. In other words, one could not be both a scientist and a professional in political science.

The hypocrisy of the dominant view is that political scientists are providing service to a specific clientele and to that extent they are engaging in politics by serving the state and state elites. Ithiel de Sola Pool incurred the wrath of new political scientists for forthrightly arguing that social scientists ought to train “the new mandarins” of the twentieth century on grounds that “the only hope for human government in the future” is “the extensive use of the social sciences by government.”¹⁴¹ While most Caucus members probably accepted this ideal in principle, they parted ways with de Sola Pool on his recommendation that to fully realize this humanizing role, social scientists should work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Thus, when many of the profession’s top academic elites, including the APSA’s Executive Director, were actually discovered to have ties to the CIA, it was a shock that stimulated the Caucus toward activities aimed at capturing and redefining the nature of the profession or, more immediately, the professional association of political scientists.¹⁴²

It was discovered, for example, that many American political scientists were doing research for the CIA and the Department of Defense, including officers of the APSA who were linked to Operations and Policy Research, a CIA-funded research organization, while the APSA treasurer had indirectly received funds from the CIA through conduits such as the Asia Foundation.¹⁴³ There were contemporary revelations that various think tanks and research institutes that employed political scientists provided military and foreign policy advice to support the Vietnam War and to pacify US urban centers.¹⁴⁴ How could official political science claim to be value-neutral, while conducting research on counter-insurgency tactics? Wolfe concluded that “in spite of its ideology of neutrality, there is little doubt that most political scientists are working hard to support the contemporary American status quo.”¹⁴⁵Lewis Lipsitz echoed this view by noting that:

Despite the impression the convention or the main professional journals might give, social scientists were involved in the making of significant political decisions—pacifying Vietnam; designing the bombing; creating the Diem regime; thinking about a ‘war’ on poverty. Moreover, the political science profession as a whole gave evidence in the main thrust of its work of a shamefully thoughtless endorsement of the American status quo; an endorsement built into the assumptions and often explicit in the conclusions of much research.¹⁴⁶

This phase of criticizing the profession and its members took the critique of Apolitical Politics a step further by offering concrete evidence that the purveyors of official ideology were not just well intentioned, but unconscious of the implications of their work, but had extensive financial, political, and ideological commitments to the existing power structure and were integrated into that power structure at multiple levels. Importantly, the Caucusistas did not reject a role for political scientists in policy-making, nor offer in its stead an ivory tower conception of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The new political science proposed an equally ideologically driven critique of “the particular uses of knowledge to which much of the profession was now committed and the complacent—even positive—attitude adopted by many political scientists toward these developments.”¹⁴⁷ Thus, when the CNPS declared establishment political science “irrelevant,” it was actually demanding that political science “serve the interests of the poor and oppressed around the world,” rather than “the interests of the U.S. government and the corporate establishment.”¹⁴⁸

Organizational Revolt or Intellectual Revolution?

The growing dissatisfaction of CNPS members with both the discipline and profession of political science finally led some to raise the fateful question of what was to be done. In The Caucus Papers, Wolfe reports that radical intellectuals in many of the social science disciplines were pursuing two strategies that while “initially essential” had “now reached the point where at least in political science they are counterproductive.”¹⁴⁹ These strategies were muckraking within the discipline and professional organization within its disciplinary association.

In political science, muckraking included the numerous critiques of behavioralism and pluralism, the critiques of the APSA and the professional mystique, and documenting the often subtle but still repressive limits to academic freedom within the American university. Wolfe reports after two years of muckraking “all of these activities … are fun. All of them, in addition, have become tiring.”¹⁵⁰ Wolfe’s assessment of the current situation was that “there is only so much rationality within the universities and the academic professions” so that in the end rational arguments designed to point out the intellectual limitations of the discipline and political flaws in its organization will persuade only a small number of people to join the Caucus—either intellectually or politically.¹⁵¹ Quite the contrary, it was the nature of any organization to develop ingenious rationalizations to deflect those critiques (for example, Herzberg’s charges of anti-professionalism), or when challenged by raw political organization, to respond in kind (for example, the Ad Hoc Committee). Consequently, Wolfe concluded that there was “a point in the development of insurgent groups within academic disciplines where they have to stop being internally critical of the practices and content of their profession and turn their attention to more important things.”¹⁵² He urged the CNPS and its individual members to shift their attention away from the discipline and its problems to more productive activities, such as communicating directly with the general public or organizing neighborhoods and communities. This shift of strategy would effectively operationalize in practice Christian Bay’s distinction between pseudo-politics and politics.

A second activity pursued by insurgents in the social sciences was organizing within the academic professions for radical ends. Wolfe again concludes that organizing inside the APSA was a waste of time. First, he acknowledged that radicals would always constitute a minority within the political science discipline, so in the long run what difference would it make to have a Caucus member on the APSA’s executive council or a Caucus member on the APSR’s editorial board? Organizing within the APSA would just lead to more muckraking for the sake of more muckraking, but it would never yield any substantial political gains or produce any substantial change in the content of the APSR. Second, the new political science had defined itself intellectually as a critique of behavioralism and pluralism, while politically it was articulating its organizational aims in terms of traditional liberal values, such as academic freedom and fair representation. In this respect, Wolfe considered it worth remembering that the original critiques of behavioralism had come from Straussians and other political philosophers, while the most widely accepted critique of pluralism had been that of the interest group liberals, most of whom “were excellent scholars, but who could hardly be considered political radicals.”¹⁵³ In the short-run, Lowi would probably exert more influence on the discipline than Miliband, so continuing the critique of pluralism did not necessarily lead one beyond liberalism.

Thus, what were the next steps for the Caucus for a New Political Science? First, Wolfe suggested that the CNPS needed to recognize that any hope of transforming the political science discipline or capturing its professional association was a pipedream. He echoed David Kettler, the current chairman of the CNPS (1969–70), who worried that dissipating the members’ energies on these false promises would lead to cynical passivity after too many harsh defeats.¹⁵⁴ The best the CNPS could hope to achieve within the APSA, and within the wider profession, was to make universities and the social science disciplines “places where we can do our work, including, of course, work between teachers and students.”¹⁵⁵ In fact, many in the Caucus began asking how to go about teaching a new political science and how to pursue a politics of higher education that would create protected spaces for such teaching.¹⁵⁶ An important part of this strategy was the publication by Caucus members of new introductory textbooks on American Government, including Political Analysis: An Unorthodox Approach (1972) by Alan Wolfe and Charles A. McCoy, Michael Parenti’s wildly successful Democracy for the Few (1974), and Edward S. Greenberg’s American Political System: A Radical Approach (1977).¹⁵⁷

Second, Wolfe proposed that insurgent political scientists join with their more numerous colleagues in disciplines such as sociology and history, and with colleagues in other nations, to establish a new flagship journal and to create new interdisciplinary professional associations of radical scholars. The purpose of a new journal was to provide a platform for the new political science unhindered by the ideological and methodological restrictions of mainstream journals. He pointed to the new Socialist Scholars Conference, which had been first convened in 1965, as an example of the type of interdisciplinary association he had in mind. This type of interdisciplinary association, with its own flagship journal, might generate the critical mass to confront existing disciplinary associations with a dual power configuration.¹⁵⁸ On the other hand, Wolfe predicted correctly that:

if reforms are instituted while the same political science I have described is adhered to, nothing will be gained. Interest will temporarily pick up; business meetings will become more lively for a while … candidates will run against one another; but eventually things will be pretty much the same.¹⁵⁹

The Caucus as a whole ignored Wolfe’s prescriptions and pursued a vigorous organizational strategy within the APSA. Following Hans Morgenthau’s failed bid for the APSA Presidency in 1970, the CNPS nominated Richard A. Falk (1971), and then Peter Bachrach for the Presidency (1972–73), with Bachrach capturing 49.5% of the vote in 1972 and coming within 60 votes (out of 6471 cast) of winning the Presidency (see Figure 1). Following presidential bids by Murray Edelman (40.6%), Frances Fox Piven (37.9%), C.B. MacPherson (29.5%), Bertell Ollman (28.4%), and Michael Parenti (21.1%), the Caucus ceased to run any candidates for APSA office. In 1980, organizational politics returned to normal when the officers and council members nominated by the APSA Nominating Committee were elected unanimously in an uncontested election at the Annual Business Meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Figure 1. CNPS APSA Presidential Nominees: Percent Vote Received, 1969–1979.

In contrast, Wolfe did not run on the CNPS slate after running for APSA vice-president in 1969. He resigned from the Caucus in 1971 after publicly criticizing it as a failure.¹⁶⁰ Similarly, after a brief membership, Theodore J. Lowi quit the CNPS at the peak of its electoral strength for having sacrificed the “intellectual revolution” that generated the new political science for its pursuit of a “political revolution.” However, a small group of Caucus activists, including many who were also committed to the organizational revolution, simultaneously pursued the intellectual revolution by establishing Politics and Society, a new journal which published its first issue in November of 1970.¹⁶¹ The journal’s editorial board consisted of Ira Katznelson (editor), Gordon Adams, Philip Brenner, Judith Coburn, Lewis Lipsitz, and Alan Wolfe. Its fifteen member group of advisory editors was a veritable who’s who of the new political science, including Philip Abrams, Peter Bachrach, Henry Kariel, Christopher Lasch, Ralph Miliband, and Michael Parenti, amongst others.

An introduction to the journal justified the need for a new academic journal by invoking C. Wright Mills’s indictment of the social sciences for “promoting ‘a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by methodological pretensions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.’”¹⁶² The new journal’s editors chastised existing mainstream association journals for being “obsessed with technique at the expense of imagination, significance, and readability.”¹⁶³ Consequently, Politics & Society was established as “an alternative forum” for political scientists, sociologists, historians, and other scholars seeking to publish research in “undersupported areas of research,” but with the requirement that articles be in “lucid English.” The journal’s editorial policy was to “encourage a variety of methodological approaches,” but to reject any discussion of methodological questions that were divorced from substance and that ignored the value and philosophical implications of particular approaches.¹⁶⁴

Politics and Society soon emerged as a leading outlet for political analyses informed by Marxist theory with articles by Robert Alford, Amy Beth Bridges, Stephen Eric Bronner, Alan Wolfe, Edward S. Greenberg, Ira Katznelson, David Kettler, Claus Offe, Michael Parenti, Jean-Claude Garardin, Isaac Balbus, Manuel Castells, James Petras, Theda Skocpol, and Immanuel Wallerstein. However, in Spring of 1973 (Vol. 3, No. 3), the advisory editors were discontinued and the editorial board was reconstituted in ways that signaled its drift away from new political science toward what would later emerge as “the new institutionalism” and “historical sociology.”¹⁶⁵ Indeed, only one issue later, the journal would publish Theda Skocpol’s review of Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, where she articulated the basic premise of the new institutionalism and state autonomy theory.¹⁶⁶ Alan Wolfe left the journal in early 1976 to be replaced later by Erik Olin Wright and Temma Kaplan in late 1976. Fred Block and Theda Skocpol were added to the board in early 1979 and, while not incompatible with the new political science, by the end of the 1970s Politics and Society no longer had any direct relationship to the CNPS or any significant number of its members. Politics and Society drifted away from its origins in the CNPS just as the Caucus was reaching the end of its political and organizational phase in the APSA.

However, the Caucus had begun a broadsheet in the late 1970s called New Political Science, which was elevated to the status of an official journal in 1979. In announcing the new journal, the editors observed that it signaled a transition from organizational activism to intellectual activism made necessary by the changing political circumstances of the CNPS:

In the absence of a large, supportive movement, the advance of the ‘march through the institutions’ begun a decade ago, has ground to a halt. Although spirited struggles continue, they focus less on the fulfillment of a program than on a defense of positions already attained. Though western universities may never have contained so large an audience sympathetic to Marxist interpretations of society, it is nevertheless true that attention has been turned from the realization of a corresponding politics to the protection of its right to existence.¹⁶⁷

Victor Wallis, a former CNPS chairman (1977–78), pointed out that the Caucus had clearly passed its electoral peak in the APSA, with only one CNPS candidate elected to the APSA Executive Council in 1977 followed by a “complete shutout” in 1978.¹⁶⁸ Following Michael Parenti’s defeat as an APSA presidential candidate in 1979, the Caucus had reached the end of its active political role within the Association, and it was for this reason that the CNPS needed “a full-scale alternative outlet” for its views that would reach out “directly to the grassroots.”¹⁶⁹ Wallis argued that the Caucus’s continued presence within the APSA “forces it to pay more than just lip-service to its supposedly unchallenged ideals of free inquiry and equality of opportunity,” while CNPS panels would “remain important for exchanges among ourselves.”¹⁷⁰ However, the journal New Political Science was considered an important first step in establishing the CNPS as “a viable counter-institution to the American Political Science Association.”¹⁷¹ The journal was to serve as the Caucus’s most immediate tangible challenge to APSA’s intellectual hegemony, but there was a clear expectation at the time that the Caucus would be strengthened—and in the long run superseded—by its dual character as a counter-association.¹⁷²

During the mid- to late-1970s, the CNPS made numerous efforts to expand its role beyond the APSA by sponsoring local chapters and regional mini-conferences, but the dispersion of its members across the country made it difficult to sustain the critical mass necessary for a local chapter outside of the large university-laden cities of the Northeast (for example, Boston, New York, Philadelphia). For a while, the CNPS also convened a “June Conference” of its representative Assembly, but this too drew attendees primarily from the Northeast as the meetings were generally held in New York City. The CNPS also sponsored a major conference on “Socialism Today” at Brown University, which drew more than two hundred attendees in 1975. Finally, the CNPS also attempted with mixed success to institutionalize its presence at regional political science association meetings, such as the Northeastern, Western, and Mid-Western Political Science Associations.

Jane Gruenebaum and Paul Thomas were elected co-chairs of the Caucus in 1978–79 based on their commitment to continue building a counter-association, primarily by organizing independent local chapters that were expected to produce “a rapid growth in membership.”¹⁷³ Gruenebaum and Thomas echoed Wallis’s message by pointing out that the Caucus had a dual identity as both a section within the APSA and an independent Caucus existence as a counter-association (that is, a 401(3)(c) non-profit corporation).¹⁷⁴ The emphasis might fluctuate between one identity or the other given particular contexts and circumstances, but the prevailing view by 1979 was that the CNPS’s active political role within the APSA had come to an end and it was time to use its intellectual role within the APSA as a platform for building its identity as a separate counter-association. As Wolfe had proposed earlier, a second step in this direction would be to build links with sympathetic organizations in other disciplines, such as the Union for Radical Political Economics, the Radical Historians Organization, and Critical Sociology.¹⁷⁵

The continuing inward turn away from direct organizational conflict with the APSA was reflected in the second issue of New Political Science, which was devoted to an analysis of “the socialist academic” and “the structure of higher education.” This issue of New Political Science explicitly declared that the Caucus was:

committed to developing an understanding and critique of capitalist society, to helping create the social changes needed to transcend it, and to replacing feelings of isolation with a sense of community and collective action. Now it is focusing its energies on building the strong organization needed to advance an alternative politics and to create a socialist center of gravity within the profession.¹⁷⁶

The CNPS was in principle entering a new phase that would focus on creating a more secure presence for critical thought and left-wing political activities within the university generally and that would forge links between the Caucus and activist groups outside of academia. However, vague this alternative politics might be it was clear by 1979 that the socialism of the young radicals had superseded the procedural politics of the old liberals. New political science was the critique of capitalist society and by proposing a socialist alternative it positioned itself as the clear ideological alternative to the orthodoxies of official political science.

The Dialectics of New Political Science

It is ironic that within three years of its founding, one of the Caucus’s founding members, Alan Wolfe, had left the organization and authored a scathing critique of the CNPS for being focused on pseudopolitics instead of politics, while Theodore Lowi, one of the movement’s leading intellectual inspirations and a charter member, had left the Caucus and authored a similarly scathing critique of the CNPS for sacrificing intellectual revolution to political revolt. While coming from divergent standpoints, both individuals criticized the Caucus for diverting its efforts into organizational activism within the APSA and, thereby, abandoning both the ideals of political revolution (Wolfe) and intellectual revolution (Lowi) that catalyzed the new political science. Only in 1979, after the Caucus was organizationally exhausted, and the external political climate had dramatically changed, did the CNPS attempt a return to those original goals.

The Caucus for a New Political Science never won control of the American Political Science Association, but it would be unfair to say that it failed to achieve any significant organizational gains. The CNPS secured its status as the first unofficial “organized section” in the APSA with the right to organize its own panels starting in 1969. The CNPS successfully initiated a process that began breaking the APSA apparatchiki’s monopoly over political discussion within the association.¹⁷⁷ The Caucus probably reached its apogee as an intellectual force in the early 1980s when Bertell Ollman challenged the APSA’s leadership to debate Caucus members in a series of well-attended panels that pitted Caucus members, such as Peter Bachrach, Sheldon Wolin, Stephen Bronner, John Ehrenberg, Ira Katznelson, Mark Kesselman, Ralph Miliband, Bertell Ollman, Michael Parenti, and Frances Fox Piven against representatives of the behavioral establishment, such as Nelson Polsby, Robert Dahl, Sidney Verba, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Aaron Wildavsky.¹⁷⁸

The CNPS also promoted a greater concern in the APSA with the real problems of academic freedom in American universities and with the special concerns of women, African Americans, and Latino/as in the profession. The CNPS supported the creation of official study committees and caucuses that at least secured better representation of these groups’ concerns in the APSA. Equally significant, there are now forty-seven organized sections in the APSA and it was the Caucus which created the conditions that made it necessary and possible for the APSA to incorporate these diverse groups into the professional organization of political science. Whether in groups devoted to political theory, political economy, political history, migration, class and inequality, biopolitics, ethnomethodology, ecology, or literature, the proliferation of these groups has enriched political science by facilitating the discipline’s incorporation of interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and knowledge, as well as previously marginalized areas of study.

Thus, one of its long-term impacts of the Caucus on the discipline was to initiate the trend toward organized sections, which now represent a plurality of methodological approaches and topical areas of study previously excluded from the discipline. It is tempting to say these sections have been co-opted, marginalized, or ghettoized, but in fact it is the political science “discipline” that has been deconstructed within its own organizational umbrella. While Caucus members remain a small proportion of the APSA’s regular membership—about four percent—it established a precedent that has resulted in the proliferation of “organized sections” to represent the growing interest amongst political scientists in interdisciplinary, subfield, and methodological research that falls outside the official discipline. The combined membership of the APSA’s organized sections is greater than that of the discipline as a whole, while total attendance at “section” panels of the APSA’s annual meeting may be higher overall than at the main “disciplinary” panels. Political science is now fragmented into so many subfields, methodological approaches, area specializations, and competing theories that “political scientists apparently come together at APSA meetings, but only in spatial terms.”¹⁷⁹

Lee Sigelman, a recent editor of the APSR, concedes that “political science is hardly a ‘discipline’ at all in the sense of being a distinct branch of learning … These days it is harder than ever to find a center of intellectual gravity in our discipline.”¹⁸⁰ One might lament this state of affairs and protest that this diversity is still not reflected in the official discipline as defined by its flagship journals, officers, and executive council.¹⁸¹ However, it is reflected in the proliferation of alternative journals, the distribution of panels at APSA and regional conventions, in book series, the emergence of new interdisciplinary (and radical) professional associations, and course offerings at colleges. There is still a core group of APSA elites—an academic establishment—who reproduce themselves in official positions and dominate the Association’s journals, but it is unlikely that this academic establishment any longer exerts the kind of professional authority or disciplinary power attributed to it by the CNPS’s founders and activists. Indeed, the persistent criticism of the flagship journals signals the growing distance between the official discipline and the mainstream discipline, if we define the “mainstream” discipline as the intellectual orientations of most living political scientists. We have allowed disciplinary elites to label the officialdom’s discipline as “the mainstream” for far too long, when in fact it is not the mainstream of the discipline as it is actually practiced by most political scientists.¹⁸²

At the same time, Wolfe was correct to criticize the CNPS for reducing political activism to professional activism. Lowi was also correct to criticize the CNPS for viewing organizational politics as synonymous with intellectual revolution. The fact is that capturing the APSA was never crucial to either the political or intellectual objectives of new political science, because the APSA does not organize those relationships. The political relationships that were condemned by the early Caucus were organized directly through the CIA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), private foundations, a network of private and corporate consultant relationships, and many other linkages that have nothing to do with the APSA and which the APSA can neither obstruct nor facilitate with any great capacity. These are relationships organized by corporations and the state.

The intellectual relationships—the official paradigm of political science—is certainly reproduced by the Association’s flagship journal, but the APSR does not any longer define the mainstream discipline of political science. One creates a new political science by doing new political science and not by capturing the APSA, much less by winning a few positions on its Executive Council. Indeed, the APSA has been almost helpless to stop the proliferation of a new political science not only in the explosion of “organized sections,” but also in the publication of alternative journals and through alternative scholarly conferences and professional associations, such as the Union of Radical Political Economics, Socialist Scholars Conference, Rethinking Marxism Conference, Historical Materialism Conference, amongst many others, which collectively generate as much attendance as the annual APSA convention.

However, even by the standards of success established in The Caucus Papers, the CNPS has been comparatively successful in achieving its realistic objectives. It has sustained the critique of pluralism, advanced alternative post-behavioral social science methodologies, supported a journal and a book series, and made the practice of a radical and critical political science—in many forms—tolerable within a discipline inhabited by people that Alan Wolfe described as intellectually immovable and just plain strange.¹⁸³ However, as Seidelman observes, the success enjoyed by the CNPS was:

confined to the narrow limits of changing the modes by which intellectuals thought, acted and communicated … The reform constituency of reform political science became other political scientists themselves … Indeed, the Caucus’s activities centered exclusively on the politics of political science itself.¹⁸⁴

The result is that:

the CNPS narrowed its goals to the concrete, material and limited demands of an interest group within the discipline, trading the uncertainties of movement activity for a larger piece of the existing pie … Seldom were bridges sought between intellectual inquiry and movement politics.¹⁸⁵

John Dryzek repeats Seidelman’s assessment of the CNPS, but his criticism is more harsh:

Its assault on the commanding heights of the APSA having failed, the Caucus settled down to life as one of the APSA’s ever-proliferating Organized Sections, sponsoring its own (eventually quite small) set of panels, and publishing a journal, New Political Science, largely ignored by the rest of the discipline.¹⁸⁶

In an oft quoted criticism by Theodore Lowi, the “Caucus for a New Political Science was converted into the Caucus for a New Political Science Association.”¹⁸⁷

It seems in retrospect that Wolfe was correct about the limits to the “rationality” of the discipline, precisely because its leading members’ are integrated into the US and global power structure. Political Science is not just about science; it is about ideology and power, but the structure of power and ideology originates in locations not even touched by the American Political Science Association. A critical article published in the APSR may be good for one’s career, but is it likely to change many minds within the discipline much less within the general public? Thus, a real question for new political science is who is our audience? Who are we talking to today?

For just as the APSA does not organize the discipline’s relationship to the state, it also does not control access to the wider public. Conservatives have understood this fact better than radicals and leftists. There is a widely recognized cadre of conservative public intellectuals, who have taken their case directly to the media and to the public with popular publications, talk shows on radio and television, and whose books by the way, we assign as required readings in university classrooms even though most of the public intellectuals on the right are not university professors. Conservative intellectuals have rejected the university as a liberal enclave and established alternative modes of communication that connect directly with political elites and mass audiences. As Wolfe observes in The Caucus Papers, “neither Marx nor Voltaire pursued his vocation within a university.”¹⁸⁸

Surkin and Wolfe argue that in its most general principles, the new political science is not particularly different from the policy orientation described by Harold Lasswell in 1951.¹⁸⁹ What makes the new political science revolutionary is not its methodological challenge to behavioralism, its incessant questioning of pluralism, or even its critique of the role of intellectuals. What makes the new political science a radical political science is the nature of the social problems it identifies and the solutions that it proposes for those problems. A new and radical political science does not seek solutions that adjust, adapt, and tinker with existing economic, social, and political institutions, but proposes new institutional forms as an alternative way to organize those relationships. In its origins as a critical approach to the established discipline, it does not entail any necessary commitment to a particular method, theory, or political ideology.¹⁹⁰ It can only be said that the new political science is a critical political science and a radical political science.

Yet, for this reason, the new political science gravitates between antinomies of numerous identities. It has defined itself as both a methodological and an ideological dissent from the mainstream discipline, but an individual need not be one to be the other, and this dialectic generates a constant source of intellectual and political tension within the organization. It is often ignored that from a methodological standpoint the Straussians, who are ideologically conservative, if not reactionary, were amongst the first and the most strident critics of behavioralism. Thus, a methodological critique of behavioralism is not coincident with a particular ideology, nor were many of the new political scientists anti-behavioralists except in their recognition of its methodological limitations. Is the new political science a rejection of behavioralism, a refinement of behavioralism, or a supplement to behavioralism? It has been all of these things simultaneously.

When one shifts to the problem of ideology, the new political science has developed as an immanent critique of liberalism and as a radical alternative to liberalism. Its questioning of contemporary liberalism as pluralism originated in the anti-pluralist critiques of Henry Kariel, Grant McConnell, Murray Edelman, and William E. Connolly, which during the CNPS’s founding culminated in the interest-group liberalism of Theodore J. Lowi. Yet, by the conclusion of the Caucus’s organizational insurgency in 1979, its journal New Political Science presumed “the desirability of socialist transformation.”¹⁹¹ The new political science has generally been characterized by a consensus that social problems originate in the structures of liberalism, that is, capitalist democracy, but there has increasingly been a wide-ranging and open-ended disagreement about how to define those problems, as well as the solutions to those problems.

Given the high priority accorded to theoretical analysis by the new political science, it is no surprise that political philosophers and political theorists of many persuasions have played a prominent role in the CNPS. The prominence of political philosophers in the CNPS has frequently entangled the concept of a new political science with the unique problems that political philosophers confronted in an increasingly behavioral discipline. However, as Christian Bay and others made clear from the beginning, the new political science is not the old political philosophy. In fact, Bay went to great lengths to dissociate the new political science from the types of anti-behavioral criticisms advanced by the Straussians, precisely because NPS rejects the fact-value distinction. Behavioralists and Straussians occupy opposite poles of the same false dichotomy. NPS seeks to bridge that dichotomy and not widen it.

Finally, the Caucus for a New Political Science is often torn between its role as a section within the American Political Science Association and its Caucus existence as counter-association. Critics of the Caucus, including former members, have dismissed organizational activism as a path leading to cooptation and as a diversion from the Caucus’s intellectual revolution¹⁹² and political revolution.¹⁹³ While the CNPS is now comfortably institutionalized within the APSA in the form of the New Political Science Section, it is highly unlikely that it would have made the gains that it did make for its members in its early years without organizational activism. It is testimony to the remarkable staying power of the academic establishment that so much organizational activism, including direct confrontation, was necessary to secure some modest gains. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that only a few years ago the APSA Executive Council adopted minimum membership rules for organized sections that nearly dissolved the CNPS. Its existence is still clearly a concern within the discipline’s official ranks.

On the other hand, the CNPS is a counter-association albeit in a muted form at the present time. It is the Caucus and not the organized section that owns and publishes New Political Science. It is the Caucus and not the organized section that publishes the New Political Science book series. It is the Caucus that interacts with radical caucuses in other disciplines. It is the Caucus that has the opportunity to build a larger independent association that is interdisciplinary and international in its membership. It is easy to say that new political science is all of these things, but as a practical matter, it is all of these things, because each of these currents is represented within its membership. It is the Caucus’s dual identity—and perhaps multiple identities—that has been its strength over the years and while it may veer too far in one direction at certain times (for example, internal organizing) and sacrifice gains in other areas as a result (for example, external political alliances), this dual identity has arisen in response to shifting political circumstances within and without the APSA. Which leads to the question: which way do we go now?

Notes on contributor

Clyde W. Barrow is Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He specializes in state theory and American political thought. His books include Toward a Critical Theory of States (2016), Class, Power and the State in Capitalist Society (2008), Critical Theories of the State (1993), and Universities and the Capitalist State (1990). He is currently Treasurer of the Caucus for a New Political Science (2015-2017) and served previously as Chair of the CNPS (2009-2013).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^* This is a revised and expanded version of an earlier article published as Barrow, Clyde, W. “The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture 30:2 (2008), pp. 215–244.

¹ Caucus for a New Political Science, “Constitution (as Revised Fall 1978),” (photocopy on file with the author).

² David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985).

³ Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.), Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 1, 9. Also see Robert Salisbury, “Current Criticism of APSA is Nothing New,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34 (December 2001), p. 767, and Theodore Lowi, “Every Poet His Own Aristotle,” in Monroe (ed.), Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 45–52, on the parallels between the new political science revolt and the Perestroika rebellion: John S. Dryzek, “Revolutions without Enemies: Key Transformations in Political Science,” American Political Science Review 100:4 (November 2006), p. 491, observes that “many of the younger members of the Perestroika e-mail list in the early 2000s were apparently unaware of this last attempted reformation of the discipline, and needed reminding that once there was the Caucus, and indeed that it lived still.”

⁴ Following the Perestroika rebellion, membership in the New Political Science Organized Section of the APSA grew from 309 in 2000 to 516 in 2007. Catherine E. Rudder, 2000. “Executive Director’s Report,” (PSOnline: 2000), available at www.apsanet.org.

⁵ John G. Gunnell, “The Real Revolution in Political Science.” PS: Political Science and Politics 37:1 (January 2004), pp. 47–50.

⁶ Charles E. Marriam, New Aspects of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925).

⁷ David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953); Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956).

⁸ 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).

⁹ Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, IL: Free Press), pp. 75, 126–27, states that political science “is concerned with the power relations within the institutional system and with a broader aspect of settlement of terms. ... Neither power in the political sense nor the operation of government as a sub-system of the social system can be treated in terms of a specifically specialized conceptual scheme ... precisely for the reason that the political problem of the social system is a focus for the integration of all of its analytically distinguishable components, not of a specifically differentiated class of these components. Political science thus tends to be a synthetic science, not one built about an analytical theory as is the case with economics.”

¹⁰ David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 106.

¹¹ Ibid.,106.

¹² David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis, pp. 21–23.

¹³ For example, David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). For an analysis of this relationship see James Petras, “Ideology and United States Political Scientists,” in Charles A. McCoy and John Playford (eds), Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (New York, NY: ThomasY. Crowell, 1967), pp. 76–98. Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis, p. 22, articulates the relationship in the following way: “The behavioral approach testifies to the coming of age of theory in the social sciences as a whole, wedded, however, to a commitment to the assumptions and methods of empirical science. Unlike the great traditional theories of past political thought, new theory tends to be analytic, not substantive, explanatory rather than ethical, more general and less particular. That portion of political research which shares these commitments to both the new theory and the technical means of analysis and verification thereby links political science to broader behavioral tendencies in the social sciences; hence its description as political behavior.”

¹⁴ Robert A. Dahl, Social Science Research on Business: Product and Potential (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 36.

¹⁵ Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). Charles A. McCoy and John Playford, (eds), Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behaviorialism (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967), p. 10, suggest that by the mid-1960s it would “not be unwarranted to speak of the behavioralists as members of an ‘establishment’ within the discipline.” Indeed, Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis, pp. 4, 20, declares the behavioral revolution a fait accompli and refers to its practitioners as a “concrete academic movement” within political science.

¹⁶ Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (London, UK: Jonathan Cape, 1970); Alain Touraine, The May Movement (New York, NY: Random House, 1971); Nigel Young, An Infantile Disorder? The Crisis and Decline of the New Left (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).

¹⁷ National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report: The 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1988 [1968]).

¹⁸ William E. Connolly, Political Science and Ideology (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1967).

¹⁹ A political history of the CNPS is a much needed corrective to the omissions and misrepresentations of existing disciplinary histories.

²⁰ H. Mark Roelofs, The Tension of Citizenship: Private and Public Duty (New York, NY: Rinehart, 1957); H. Mark Roelofs, The Language of Modern Politics: An Introduction to the Study of Government (Homewood, IL.: Dorsey Press, 1967).

²¹ H, Mark Roelofs, “Roelofs, H. Mark (1923–).” Contemporary Authors (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2004).

²² Ibid.

²³ Christian Bay, The Structure of Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), ch. 5; Christian Bay, “Preface to the 1965 Printing,” in The Structure of Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. ix; Christian Bay, “Preface to the 1970 Printing,” in The Structure of Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp. v–vii.

²⁴ Bay, The Structure of Freedom, ch. 5.

²⁵ Bay, “Preface to the 1970 Printing,” p. ix.

²⁶ Christian Bay, “Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical Evaluation of Some Behavioral Literature,” American Political Science Review 54:1 (March 1965), p. 39.

²⁷ Bay, “Preface to the 1970 Printing,” p. xiii.

²⁸ Charles A. McCoy and John Playford (eds), Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967).

²⁹ John Ehrenberg, “Commentary: History of the Caucus for a New Political Science,” New Political Science 21: 3 (Fall 1999), p. 418.

³⁰ For example: James C. Charlesworth (ed.), The Limits of Behavioralism in Political Science (Philadelphia, PA: American Academy of Political Social Science, 1962); Alfred Cobban, “The Decline of Political Theory,” Political Science Quarterly 68:3 (September 1953), pp. 321–37; Herbert J. Storing (ed.), Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962).

³¹ The term Caucusistas is borrowed from Dryzek, “Revolutions without Enemies”; Eulau, The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics, p. 32.

³² Ibid.

³³ Alfred Cobban. “The Decline of Political Theory.” Political Science Quarterly 68:3 (September 1953), p. 335.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Herbert J. Storing. Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1962), pp. 308–09.

³⁶ Ibid., v. It is an ironic twist that Straussians used the term “New Political Science” in referring to behavioralism, because it was comparatively new in comparison to political philosophy, but they also sought to link behavioralism to its philosophical origins in Thomas Hobbes’s “new science of politics.” Christian Bay is the only person among the CNPS’s founders who was aware of this irony in his writings and it may be that the Caucus for a New Political Science was so named as an effort to recapture the heritage of Merriam, Lasswell, and Key as opposed to Leo Strauss. Indeed, at the height of the CNPS struggle within the APSA, Bay (1970, v) declared: “I still consider myself a behavioralist.”

³⁷ In 1965, Bay, “Preface to the 1965 Printing,” pp. ix–x, criticized the Straussians, who were “the most vocal among the contemporary critics of the New Science of Politics, neo-Aristotelian by persuasion” for having “failed to produce any viable alternative approach” to behavioralism. One unfortunate result of the Straussians’ s critique of behavioralism was that “political philosophy (in the now widely accepted sense in which Lasswell distinguishes this discipline from that of political science) lately by default has become the almost exclusive domain of a neo-Aristotelian breed of political scientists which has no use at all for such facts as the behavioralists produce!”

³⁸ McCoy and Playford, Apolitical Politics, p. 10.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 3.

⁴⁰ William E. Connolly, Political Science and Ideology (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1967), p. 5, states, “We accept, in short, the scientific ideal of political inquiry.” Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe, An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), p. 4 also note that “many members of the CNPS employed behavioral techniques and considered themselves ‘behavioralists’.” Also, Marvine Surkin and Alan Wolfe, “The Political Dimension of American Political Science.” Acta Politica (October 1969), p. 51.

⁴¹ Charles E. Merriam, New Aspects of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925), p. 113.

⁴² Ibid., p. 130.

⁴³ Harold D. Lasswell, “The Policy Orientation,” in Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell (eds), The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 4.

⁴⁴ Eulau, The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics, p. vii.

⁴⁵ McCoy and Playford, p. 10; V.O. Key, Jr., “The Politically Relevant in Surveys,” Public Opinion Quarterly 24:1 (Spring 1960), p. 24, observes that “The invention of the sample survey gave the study of politics a powerful observational instrument. Yet it is a tool singularly difficult to bring to bear upon significant questions of politics. Over the past two decades, surveys of national, state, and local populations have, to be sure, produced many findings … Most of these findings, though, have been primarily of sociological or psychological interest.”

⁴⁶ McCoy and Playford, Apolitical Politics, p. 11.

⁴⁷ Christian Bay, “Preface to the 1970 Printing” in Christian Bay, The Structure of Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. xvi.

⁴⁸ McCoy and Playford, Apolitical Politics, p. 10.

⁴⁹ C. Wright Mills, People, Power, and Politics: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1963), p. 226.

⁵⁰ The philosopher Robert Paul Wolff (ed.), Political Man and Social Man (New York, NY: Random House, 1966), p. 10, chastised behavioralists for their willingness to state “in forthright terms that political apathy is a Good Thing!,” because they considered voter apathy a source of political stability or system equilibrium.

⁵¹ McCoy and Playford, Apolitical Politics, p. 6.

⁵² Ibid., 3. While modern political science had its genesis in the reform politics of the Progressive era, Dwight Waldo’s Political Science in the United States: A Trend (Paris, FR: UNESCO, 1956), p. 17, attitudinal survey of American political scientists concluded, as a matter of empirical fact, that “the political order has been ‘accepted’, and distinctive American ‘political theory’ has tended to be concerned with means and methodology.”

⁵³ Key, “The Politically Relevant in Surveys,” p. 54.

⁵⁴ McCoy and Playford, Apolitical Politics, p. 7; C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, NY: Oxford University Press).

⁵⁵ For example, Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961); Nelson Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); Arnold Rose, The Power Structure (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1967).

⁵⁶ Shin’ya Ono, “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism,” in McCoy and Playford (eds), Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Co, 1967), p. 105.

⁵⁷ Robert A. Dahl, “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model,” American Political Science Review 52:1 (March 1958), pp. 463–69.

⁵⁸ Ono, “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism,” p. 108.

⁵⁹ G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967); G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1970); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society: An Analysis of the Western System of Power (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1969).

⁶⁰ Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56:4 (December 1962).

⁶¹ The irony is that Dahl understood the mobilization of bias well before he conducted his empirical research in New Haven. For example, Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956) states that a basic proposition of democratic theory is that “Constitutional rules are mainly significant because they help to determine what particular groups are to be given advantages or handicaps in the political struggle. In no society do people ever enter a political contest equally; the effect of the constitutional rules is to preserve, add to, or subtract from the advantages and handicaps with which they start the race … constitutional rules … are crucial to the status and power of the particular groups who gain or suffer by the operation.” However, what Dahl (Dahl, Who Governs?, p. 137) claimed to verify in Who Governs? had already been assumed as an ideological proposition in A Preface to Democratic Theory, namely, that “a central guiding thread of American constitutional development has been the evolution of a political system in which all the active and legitimate groups in the population can make themselves heard at some crucial stage in the process of decision.”

⁶² Bachrach and Baratz, “Two Faces of Power.” While they fail to acknowledge it, Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz’s, “Decisions and Non-Decisions: An Analytical Framework,” American Political Science Review 57:3 (September 1963), pp. 632–42, concept of non-decisions is already advanced in C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 4, where Mills observes “Whether they [the power elite] do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions; their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequence than the decisions they do make.”

⁶³ Bachrach and Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” p. 952.

⁶⁴ 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 1:3 (Summer 1968), pp. 3–29.

⁶⁵ American Political Science Association. 2011. “Constitution,” available online at: https://www.apsanet.org/portals/54/Files/APASConstitution2011.pdf

⁶⁶ Christian Bay, “Communications: To the Editor,” American Political Science Review 61:4 (December 1967), p. 1096; American Political Science Association, “Final Report of the American Political Science Association, Committee on Professional Standards and Responsibilities: Ethical Problems of Academic Political Scientists.”

⁶⁷ Bay, “Communications: To the Editor,” p, 1096.

⁶⁸ H. Mark Roelofs, “Communications: To the Editor,” PS 1:1 (Winter 1968), p. 38.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 40. Other members of the original 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).

⁷⁰ Ibid., 39.

⁷¹ Ibid., 39.

⁷² Ibid., 39.

⁷³ Bay, “Communications: To the Editor,” p. 1096.

⁷⁴ Roelofs, “Communications: To the Editor,” p. 39.

⁷⁵ Christian Bay, “For an American Political Science Association,” PS 1:1 (Summer 1968), pp. 36–38.

⁷⁶ Roelofs, “Communications: To the Editor,” p. 39.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 39.

⁷⁸ Dryzek, “Revolutions Without Enemies,” p. 491.

⁷⁹ John Ehrenberg, “Commentary: History of the Caucus for New Political Science.” New Political Science 21:3 (Fall 1999), p. 417.

⁸⁰ Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension of American Political Science.” pp. 44–45.

⁸¹ Evron M. Kirkpatrick, “Report of the Executive Director, 1968–69,” PS 2 Special Supplement (Summer 1969), pp. 479–537.

⁸² Helene Silverberg, “Gender Studies and Political Science: The History of the ‘Behavioralist Compromise’,” in James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (eds), Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 368, observes that in the late 1960s, women began entering political science graduate programs in substantial numbers and “they formed part of a growing constituency available for mobilization against the established structure of the postwar profession.” A group of these women joined the CNPS insurgency and the Caucus attempted to attract women to its ranks by creating its own Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, chaired (ironically) by (a male) Alan Wolfe. David Easton responded by appointing an APSA Committee on the Status of Women, but neither vehicle was deemed suitable for advancing women’s issues in the profession, which led a small group to found the Women’s Caucus for Political Science. Like the CNPS, the WCPS sought to promote both intellectual and organizational change within the APSA. A Black Caucus was organized almost simultaneously with the other two caucuses, which signaled an immediate need to address gender and race discrimination, as well as a possible split on the left between class and identity politics.

⁸³ Kirkpatrick, “Report of the Executive Director”, p. 479; David Easton, “The New Revolution in Political Science,” American Political Science Review 63:4 (December 1969), p. 1051.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Alan Wolfe, “Practising the Pluralism We Preach: Internal Processes in the American Political Science Association,” Antioch Review 29 (Fall 1969), p. 354.

⁸⁶ Alan Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” in Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe (eds), An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), pp. 288–309.

⁸⁷ Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, p. 5.

⁸⁸ John E. Mueller, “The Political Scientist Decides: An Examination of the 1969 APSA Ballots,” PS 3:3 (Summer 1970), p. 311.

⁸⁹ Donald G. Herzberg, “To the Editor,” PS 2:4 (Autumn 1969), p. 704.

⁹⁰ James W. Prothro, “To the Editor,” PS 2:4 (Autumn 1969), pp. 702–03.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² Ibid.

⁹³ American Arbitration Association, “1970 APSA Election Results,” PS 4:1 (Winter 1971), p. 49; Charles L. Taylor and Gordon Tullock, “The 1970 APSA Elections,” PS 4:3 (Summer 1971), p. 354.

⁹⁴ Mueller, “The Political Scientist Decides.”; Taylor and Tullock, “The 1970 APSA Elections.”; Bernard Grofman, “The 1971 APSA Elections,” PS 5:3 (Summer 1972), pp. 278–89.

⁹⁵ Grofman, “The 1971 APSA Elections,” p. 283.

⁹⁶ PS also published the results of a rather weak mail survey (n ¼ 176) of political scientists in the Mountain West (i.e. Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), which found “that behavioralism has far more adherents with the profession than does post-behavioralism. ... The popularity of post-behavioralism also seems to vary with field of specialization in political science. It is particularly strong among the Political Theorists.” See Kendall L. Baker, Sami G. Hajjar, and Alan Evan Schenker, “A Note on Behavioralists and Post-Behavioralists in Contemporary Political Science,” PS 5:3 (Summer 1972), pp. 271–72.

⁹⁷ Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, p. 5.

⁹⁸ Marvin Surkin, “Sense and Nonsense in Politics,” in Surkin and Wolfe (eds), An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), pp. 13–33. Surkin proposed “an alternative methodology for the social sciences based on existential phenomenology the theoretical foundations of which are consistent with the position that for a social scientist to be empirical is not to assume that he must be value-free or nonideological. In fact, existential phenomenology is well suited to the view that an empirical analysis of reality is not only a way of understanding the social world, but that it is also a way of criticizing society and of changing it as well.” Ibid., p. 27.

⁹⁹ Parenti, “Power and Pluralism,” p. 112.

¹⁰⁰ Michael Parenti, “Power and Pluralism: A View from the Bottom,” in Surkin and Wolfe (eds), An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), p. 137.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 115.

¹⁰² Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory, pp. 88–89.

¹⁰³ Ibid., 60.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Mills, The Power Elite.; Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963); Paul M. Sweezy, The Present as History: Essays and Reviews on Capitalism and Socialism (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1953), chs. 9 and 10.

¹⁰⁶ Dahl, Who Governs?, pp. 180–81.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 164.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 101–02, 164.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 164.

¹¹⁰ Polsby, Community Power, p. 134.

¹¹¹ Ibid.

¹¹² Parenti, “Power and Pluralism,” p. 116.

¹¹³ Two important exceptions at the time were Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1962) and Herbert Hirsch, Poverty and Politicization: Political Socialization in an American Sub-Culture (New York, NY: Free Press, 1970).

¹¹⁴ See also Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1971); Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, The Politics of Turmoil: Essays on Poverty, Race, and the Urban Crisis (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1974); Michael Parenti, Power and the Powerless (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).

¹¹⁵ Bachrach and Baratz, “Two Faces of Power”; William E. Connolly (ed.), The Bias of Pluralism (New York, NY: Atherton Press, 1969); Matthew A. Crenson, The Un-Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decision-making in the Cities (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).

¹¹⁶ Matthew A. Crenson, “Nonissues in City Politics: The Case of Air Pollution,” in Surkin and Wolfe (eds), An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), p. 144.

¹¹⁷ Ibid., 144–45.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., 145.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., 144–45.

¹²⁰ See Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Decisions and Non-Decisions: An Analytical Framework,” American Political Science Review 57:3 (1963), pp. 632–42.

¹²¹ Crenson, “Nonissues in City Politics,” p. 148.

¹²² Parenti, “Power and Pluralism,” p. 113.

¹²³ Ono, “The Limits of Bourgeois Pluralism,” pp. 108–09.

¹²⁴ Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, p. 11.

¹²⁵ Parenti, “Power and Pluralism,” p. 112.

¹²⁶ Henry Kariel, The Decline of American Pluralism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966).

¹²⁷ Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969), p. 51; Theodore J. Lowi, “The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism,” American Political Science Review 61:1 (1967), pp. 5–24.

¹²⁸ Mills, The Power Elite, p. 300.

¹²⁹ Mills, The Power Elite, pp. 3–4.

¹³⁰ Domhoff, Who Rules America?, p. 11.

¹³¹ Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society.

¹³² Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, p. 169.

¹³³ James Petras, “Patterns of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and Business in Latin America,” in Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe (eds), An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970) pp. 186–87.

¹³⁴ Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, p. 6.

¹³⁵ Ibid., 5.

¹³⁶ David Kettler, “Beyond Republicanism: The Social Critique of Political Idealism” in Marvin Surkin and Alan Wolfe, An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), p. 40.

¹³⁷ Wolfe “The Professional Mystique,” p. 290.

¹³⁸ Ibid., p. 290.

¹³⁹ Ibid., p. 291.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid.

¹⁴¹ Ithiel de Sola Pool, “The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments,” Background 10 (August 1966), p. 111.

¹⁴² Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension of American Political Science,” p. 55.

¹⁴³ Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” p. 3.

¹⁴⁴ See James Ridgeway, The Closed Corporation (New York, NY: Random House, 1968); David Horowitz, “Sinews of Empire,” Ramparts 8 (October 1969), p. 32; Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1969); Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech (eds), The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1969).

¹⁴⁵ Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, p. 299.

¹⁴⁶ Lewis Lipsitz, “Vulture, Mantis, and Seal: Proposals for Political Scientists,” in George J. Graham, Jr. and George W. Carey (eds), The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science (New York, NY: David McKay Company, Inc., 1972), p. 173.

¹⁴⁷ Surkin and Wolfe, An End to Political Science, p. 4.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid.

¹⁴⁹ Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” p. 303.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid.

¹⁵¹ Ibid.

¹⁵² Ibid., 304.

¹⁵³ Ibid., p. 305.

¹⁵⁴ Quoted in Ibid., p. 306.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 306.

¹⁵⁶ See Christian Bay, “Thoughts on the Purposes of Political Science Education,” in George Graham, Jr. and George W. Carey (eds), The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science (New York, NY: David McKay Company, Inc., 1972), pp. 88–102; Theodore Lowi, “The Politics of Higher Education: Political Science as a Case Study” in George Graham, Jr. and George W. Carey (eds), The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science (New York, NY: David McKay Company, Inc., 1972), pp. 11–36; Henry Kariel, Saving Appearances: The Reestablishment of Political Science (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., Inc., 1972).

¹⁵⁷ Alan Wolfe and Charles A. McCoy, Political Analysis: An Unorthodox Approach (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., Inc., 1972); Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1974); Edward S. Greenberg, American Political System: A Radical Approach (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, 1977).

¹⁵⁸ Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension of American Political Science,” p. 61; Martin Nicolaus, “The Professional Organization of Sociology: A View from Below,” Antioch Review 29 (Fall 1969), pp. 357–87.

¹⁵⁹ Wolfe, “Practising the Pluralism We Preach,” p. 372.

¹⁶⁰ Alan Wolfe, “Unthinking About the Thinkable: Reflections on the Failure of the Caucus for New Political Science,” Politics & Society 1:3 (May 1971), pp. 398–406.

¹⁶¹ Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists, p. 198.

¹⁶² “Editorial Introduction,” Politics & Society 1:1 (November 1970), p. 1.

¹⁶³ Ibid.

¹⁶⁴ Ibid.

¹⁶⁵ Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

¹⁶⁶ Theda Skocpol, “A Critical Review of Barrington Moore’s Social Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy” Politics and Society 4:1 (Fall 1973), pp. 1–35; Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 126.

¹⁶⁷ “Note to Readers,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring 1979), p. 7; see Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff (eds), The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses (New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 1982), who suggested at the time that “a Marxist cultural revolution is taking place today in American universities.”

¹⁶⁸ Victor Wallis, “The Caucus at a Turning Point,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring 1979), pp. 90–91.

¹⁶⁹ Ibid., 90.

¹⁷⁰ Ibid., 90–91.

¹⁷¹ Ibid., 89.

¹⁷² Ibid., 92.

¹⁷³ Ibid., 91.

¹⁷⁴ Jane Gruenebaum and Paul Thomas, “CNPS 1979,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring 1979), pp. 92–94.

¹⁷⁵ Ibid., 93.

¹⁷⁶ “The Socialist Academic,” New Political Science 1:2 (1979–1980), p. 3.

¹⁷⁷ Ehrenberg, “Commentary: History of the Caucus for a New Political Science,” p. 418.

¹⁷⁸ Ibid., 419.

¹⁷⁹ Davora Yanow, “Practicing Discipline,” Politics and Society 36:3 (July 2003), pp. 398.

¹⁸⁰ Lee Sigelman, “The APSR in the Perestroika Era.” in Kristen Renwick Monroe (ed.) Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 323–29.

¹⁸¹ Monroe, Perestroika!.

¹⁸² Clyde Barrow, “Politics Denied: Comments on Waismel’s and Lowi’s ‘Politics in Motion,’” New Political Science 33:1 (March 2011), pp. 79–86.

¹⁸³ Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” p. 304, observes that “Something seems to happen to people when they become political scientists, or maybe people who become political scientists were strange to begin with. But whatever the causal relationship, this profession is one of the least movable there is. (Economics may be worse).”

¹⁸⁴ Seidelman, “The APSR in the Perestroika Era,” p. 198.

¹⁸⁵ Ibid., 199; also Raymond Seidelman, “Political Scientists, Disenchanted Realists, and Disappearing Democrats,” in James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (eds), Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 319–20.

¹⁸⁶ Dryzek, “Revolutions Without Enemies,” p. 491.

¹⁸⁷ Theodore J. Lowi, “The Politicization of Political Science,” American Politics Quarterly 1 (January 1973), pp. 43–71.

¹⁸⁸ Wolfe, “The Professional Mystique,” pp. 306–07.

¹⁸⁹ Surkin and Wolfe, “The Political Dimension,” p. 58.

¹⁹⁰ Roelofs, The Closed Corporation, p. 39, states that “the Caucus is not dedicated to any orthodoxy—or unorthodoxy—in methodology, ideological persuasion, or subject matter interests.”

¹⁹¹ “Note to Readers,” New Political Science 1:1 (Spring 1979), p. 7.

¹⁹² Lowi, “The Politicization of Political Science.”

¹⁹³ Wolfe, “Unthinking About the Thinkable.”