By most any measure, Race and the Making of American Political Science by Jessica Blatt is a significant accomplishment in and for a discipline that should learn more about its history. Fast-paced and relatively short, it is still the most “extended” and “systematic” treatment to date of “racial ideas” (p. 10) in the discipline’s past, particularly the 1890s through the 1930s. Although there are many familiar names (Burgess, Wilson, Goodnow, and Merriam) and many familiar institutions (Columbia, Hopkins, Chicago, and the APSA) and many familiar concepts (state, nation, difference, and development), Blatt presents them all in the more or less unfamiliar light of the enduring grip of their racial ideas. There were many changes in the discipline over time, but almost every political scientist was “explicitly committed to one vision or another of a definite racial order” (p. 139).

It is one thing to make a sweeping claim like this and another to document it in sufficient and convincing detail. And the book does this, at least for the political scientists and time period covered. Readers have before them details about the flat-out racism of Burgess’s Teutonic “germ” theory, the race-fueled colonialism of the early APSA, the racial uplift promised in the Journal of Race Development, the scarcely subtle white superiority in eugenics, and “the glaring and irreconcilable contradictions” over race “determinism” in “Merriam’s milieu” (p. 107).

There are also details about lesser-known counter-moments, such as Hamilton Franklin Hankin’s critique in the 1920s (at last!) of both past Teutonic racism and an emergent “race mysticism” of Boasian evolutionism. Hankin was patently no “racist” in the vulgar, vernacular sense—and neither were many later political scientists, it seems, who were nonetheless in the grip of their own (implicit?) racial commitments. Yet, like most others, Hankin in the end found no way out, ceding contradictorily to “‘an ounce of eugenics’” as if it hedged “race determinism” (p. 114).

Blatt also calls attention to Hankin’s “social-constructionist-sounding argument” that perceptions of racial unity were not the cause but a consequence of “political integration” (p. 114). One senses that Blatt, too, embraces a social-constructionist account of race in framing the project. It would be interesting for this to come out more clearly and theoretically, because not only historical but also contemporary political science may harbor essentialist notions about race (say, the “genes and politics” research with which the book begins and ends). Readers might also be asking why there were “changing notions of racial difference” (p. 4) in the particular ways the book chronicles. Is there anything like a model or theory of conceptual change at work, if only implicitly, that explains the exhaustion of one “racial order” and its replacement by another?

The disciplinary history on offer in the book begins with the “modern, university-based discipline” (p. 154n2) at Columbia, Hopkins, and the APSA. In these institutions, then, “the precept of formative late nineteenth century political science”—the ur “racial idea” that “politics are born into us” (p. 3)—took flight from Burgess’s ideas about “the state.” In the spirit of constructive dialogue and imagining further inquiries to follow, I propose thinking of disciplinary history as a subgenre of the history of ideas per se. This proves relevant, among other things, when dating beginnings and first figures. In this context, Blatt admits that “some [unnamed disciplinary historians] extend this history [of political science] to the Civil War-era writer and publicist Francis Lieber” (p. 154n2). On Blatt’s own terms, this would not be an arbitrary extension, but would actually bolster the history on offer by chasing “racial ideas” back further in time, closer to their disciplinary origins.

Lieber’s academic career spans the Civil War and was caught up in the nation’s contradictions and horrors about it. He taught and wrote the era’s defining political science texts at South Carolina College (in the heyday of antebellum hysteria). In 1857, he moved north to Columbia University, where he was the first-ever professor of political science in America. Thus, the discipline’s institutionalization began before the Civil War and continued in its immediate aftermath (with Lieber’s participation) via the American Social Science Association, from which emerged the APSA.

Of “racial ideas,” Lieber was overflowing. Not only in Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853) but even earlier in the Manual of Political Ethics (1838)—long before Burgess and Adams—he theorized “the state” and thought the “true germs” of self-government lay with “the Teutonic races,” notably the “Anglican” or “Cis-Caucasian” race whose historical “task” was to spread its “seeds of constitutional liberty.”^{Footnote 1} Popularized, this notion morphed into “manifest destiny,” preached and popularized by the Teutonist John Fiske. (Fiske was thus related to the “discipline” as an informative “outsider,” as the Progressive Herbert Croly later would be [p. 40], which is suggestive of the power of intellectual and political forces outside the discipline, helping explain developments and conceptual changes within it).

Lieber was yet further in the grips of his own “racial order,” but his ideas were profoundly inconsistent. Indeed, he was “painfully aware of the contradictions he lived.”^{Footnote 2} Coining the term “negroism,” he distinguished the “negro race” from the “white race” via physiognomy and skin color. (Other “races” were more about national character). But he questioned, “Superiority of the white race! Since when?” “Negroism” explained perceptions of racial difference but did not justify political inequality, much less slavery. Yet, Lieber himself owned slaves in South Carolina, engendering a bad conscience that eventuated in condemnation. As he wrote (in an unsent letter) to none other than John C. Calhoun, “Slavery is eminently a state of degradation,” “a contradiction in terms.”^{Footnote 3} African descendants even deserved citizenship as human beings. In a further contradiction, Lieber thought that “the word race” was an often “abused” term. Moreover, “the noblest things” like science and liberty “are not restricted to races.”^{Footnote 4}

Looking back late in his career, Burgess placed himself in Lieber’s lineage and hailed him as one of “the two names which stand highest in our American literature of political science” (the other being Lieber’s “ardent admirer,” Theodore Dwight Woolsey).^{Footnote 5} No one would render this judgment today. But we now have even better reason—thanks to the agenda set out in Race and the Making of American Political Science—to recover Lieber’s (and others’) “racial ideas” and confront the contradictions within them. Political science inherited and passed on both racial ideas and contradiction. They and their progeny, many of whom are still unexplored, require further scrutiny. For are they not the discipline’s stain to be acknowledged and addressed at last?