Although Jessica Blatt’s valuable analysis focuses on the first 50 years of American political science as a professional discipline, it begins by noting the “resurgence of biological determinism in the United States in the twenty-first century” (p. 2). Harvard geneticist David Reich has recently insisted that genome research may yet reveal genetically based differences in the average traits of human subpopulations, even though virtually all such groups will prove to have highly mixed ancestry. He maintains that if scholars simply deny the existence of these differences, instead of urging equal rights regardless of differences, they will cede credibility to those who once again claim to find biological bases for social, economic, and political systems of inequality and exclusion. Blatt reminds us that at its birth, American political science was a major contributor of such claims. Her book can help us consider whether and why modern political science might do so again—or whether and how it might play a very different role.
Blatt initially contends her “central argument” is that “race thinking shaped U.S. political science at its origins far more profoundly than has previously been recognized” (p. 4). But although important, this claim—which might be better stated as “more profoundly than has generally been recognized,” given the number of kindred scholars she cites—is less fundamental for the present and future of political science than where she ends. Blatt calls for political scientists to “attend more closely to the ways in which political life has shaped the identities we have,” so that we might mobilize politics “to transform them and to build new solidarities” (p. 147). Her book also provides useful material for exploring a question that her study touches on but does not pursue thematically: Why have political scientists so often sought premises for their work that promise to explain differences and developments in terms of “other, more basic realms” seen as “pre-political,” including, but by no means confined to, alleged biological racial differences (p. 137)?
There appear to be at least three distinguishable, though often linked, motivations at work. One is to naturalize, and thereby to justify in at least some eyes, structures of unequal power and privilege—and sometimes, though much more rarely, to use nature to call for reform of such structures. Columbia’s John W. Burgess, the profession’s seminal but quickly superseded figure, sought to replace “a priori, philosophically grounded speculation about natural rights and social contracts” with “sound, scientific principles” (p. 16). Those principles, shaped by Germanic thought and focused on historical institutions and practices, supposedly revealed, lying behind and above governing agencies, an organic, Anglo-Saxon “state” that was the true embodiment of popular sovereignty, and which had to be kept free from racial degeneracy by confining the franchise to whites, and immigration to northern Europeans. Soon, figures like Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow began to replace Hegelian-flavored notions of “the state” with calls for pragmatic executive leadership and public administration on behalf of “the people,” still imagined as rightfully white (pp. 38–39, 45). Yet as Robert Vitalis has elaborated, some of the contributors to the Journal of Racial Development, the forerunner of Foreign Affairs, believed that understanding the differences in the “blood” of racial peoples could help discern paths to a “far-reaching, even world-historical program of racial uplift” (75).
When, however, Charles Merriam and his colleagues and students began in the 1920s to call for “a scientific turn in the discipline” once again, this time following pluralists like Harold Laski in putting “internal differentiation rather than (racialized) organic unity” at the center of politics and political science, they did so primarily out of a second, distinguishable concern (p. 95). They were attracted to what they saw as measurable “psycho-biological” traits as explanations for the identities and behaviors of variegated groups (p. 126). They sought a political science that could be a “science of constructive, intelligent social control,” in service of “an educated, organized, democratic public” that, at least for Merriam and some of his allies, such as Harold Gosnell, did not have to be white (pp. 97, 133-135). For all too many, to be sure (including Merriam’s older brother John, president of Washington’s Carnegie Institution), psychometric studies of “intelligence” and “criminality” served to rationalize eugenics policies. For growing numbers of others, however, political science, understood as the empirical mapping of differences that were “deeply individual” yet “patterned within groups, and originating somewhere deeper than and precedent to political life,” was to be an instrument of “liberal, meritocratic” causes (p. 136).
Beyond reinforcing or contesting hierarchies and developing tools for social control, however, there may be a third reason for the quest to base political science on pre-political premises. Gaining prestige through its perceived national security contributions, behavioralism rose to predominance in the post-World War II era. It has since undergone development and withstood various assaults, without losing its central role in defining modern, “mainstream” political science. In part, I suggest, it has done so because it responds well to a defining desire of political scientists: to be real scientists.
Blatt repeatedly notes the role of “internal demands for empiricism” and “rigor’ in fostering “quantitative, naturalistic research” of the sort that behavioralists have preached and practiced (pp. 140, 143). Why do these demands arise, and why are they so potent? It is possible that, among other things, they express felt intellectual as well as psychological needs to find relatively fixed foundations that can ground testable, falsifiable explanations and predictions. Finding such premises can seem necessary to make a science of politics possible, at least according to many conceptions of science (not simply Popper-style positivism). If we cannot trace political conduct and its consequences back to measurable, relatively enduring pre-political sources, then political developments may appear to be radically contingent, undercutting possibilities not only for their constructive control but even for any real scientific understanding. What Burgess and Goodnow and Merriam, and many proclaimers of a new, true political science before and since, all have in common is their desire to ground political science, and thereby to comprehend and guide politics, on some thing or things that seem more fundamental and enduring than political interactions conceived as somehow a free-standing realm (or realm of freedom). Though different schools of political science have done so with different degrees of enthusiasm for history, they have all sought to overcome the fear that history and politics are really captured only by narratives of ineradicable contingency and unpredictability.
In this regard, Jessica Blatt is, and probably should be, a good political scientist herself. Though she calls for an end to conceiving of identities as fully pre-political, she also does not present them as purely political creations. She calls instead for attention to the “co-production of identity and politics,” presumably through intertwined social, economic, and yes, biological as well as political processes that we can hope to comprehend in large measure (p, 147). And she does so, again, as part of a kind of social control project—one aimed at transforming many features of the identities we have and building new social solidarities.
In these regards, as indeed in most regards, I am very much on the side of Blatt and her book. Even so, her work must still stand as a caution for us all. In our quest for a political science that can illuminate political conduct, that can provide grounds for deciding what forms of difference and inequality are and are not inevitable, and that can provide guides for improving our condition, we must not fall prey to the political and intellectual temptations that made race so central to the making of American political science. For in succumbing to them before, we helped make race and racial inequalities central to American political life.
