What Is Political Science? What Should It Be?

Abstract

This article examines the five myths that govern political science: that it studies politics; that it is scientific; that one can study politics cut off from the other social sciences and history; that the state is neutral; and that the bulk of the work in the discipline furthers the cause of democracy. Within political science, there have been three main approaches to criticizing these myths: a moderate one that treats the elements in these myths as more or less disconnected; a radical one that sees a systemic connection between these elements but doesn't bring out what it is and how it works; and a Marxist one that names this system, “capitalism,” and privileges the role of the capitalist state in explaining both politics and political science.

Keywords:

• political science
• myths
• democracy
• capitalism
• Marxism

Acknowledgements

The article was originally published in New Political Science (vol. 22, no. 4, 2000) and is re-published here for purposes of communication. Everything said in the article still applies, except—maybe—that the triviality and apparent irrelevance of most political science scholarship has gotten even worse than what I described (“apparent” irrelevance, because it serves as a substitute for other more pressing questions—also mentioned in my article—that cry out for serious study). It is in this way that some kinds of irrelevance play an important role in bourgeois ideology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Bertell Ollman is Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University, and author of Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971), Dialectical Investigations (1993), Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method (2003), and author or editor of over a dozen other books dealing with different aspects of Marxist and other socialist theories. In 2002, he won the first Charles A. McCoy Distinguished Career Award from the New Political Science Section of the American Political Science Association. For most of his writings, see www.dialecticalmarxism.com.

Notes

¹For a good example of such self-satisfaction, see Introduction of A New Handbook of Political Science (Goodin and Klingeman 1998, xiii–xvi).

²For more details about the election, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1984.

³For an extremely honorable recent exception, see The Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money Driven Political Systems (Ferguson 1995).

⁴The Pepsi Challenge has been an ongoing marketing promotion run by PepsiCo since 1975 in which regular people blind taste one cup filled with Pepsi and another with Coca Cola. For more details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge.

⁵See any issue of New Political Science, for example.