There are times when straightforward analysis clarifies what has seemed unclear and contentious for many years. When this happens in political science, it is often grounded in a deep knowledge of history in ways that, unfortunately, too many contemporary scholars seem to have little interest in pursuing. Professor Jessica Blatt’s book Race and the Making of American Political Science uses the historical and individual origins of the early development of the discipline of political science. Moreover, if political science is the study of power and its consequences, none of us should be surprised to find that the identification, justification, and exacerbation of racial hierarchy and white supremacy, so central to the 13 colonies being able to agree on the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of 1787, through slavery and its contorted integration within these founding documents, were at the heart of the development of political science as well. Among the most fundamental dimensions of the character and soul of American government is its acceptance of racialized white supremacy, in its ever-evolving forms. Professor Blatt’s book, magnificently researched and elegantly written, convincingly reveals this historical legacy for our discipline. In doing so, she has given the profession yet another opportunity to learn from the past and, if we have the self-confidence, to look in the mirror, feel uncomfortable if not sincerely sad, and work to overcome this racialized legacy in all the active research and teaching we do today.

The analysis Blatt provides of the critical role played by John W. Burgess and the Columbia School of Political Science is extraordinary. Not only was Burgess a direct contributor, if not the actual founder, of political science, the first PhD program in political science, and the American Political Science Association (APSA), he was also, as Blatt states, “an especially committed and vehement racist, even by the standards of late nineteenth-century America” (p. 13). Blatt argues that his valuing of white supremacy, often phrased as “Teutonic domination” (p. 15), is likely related to his coming from a slaveholding, pro-Union family, as well as his experiences as a Union soldier during the Civil War: these resulted in a severe critique of social justice, formal equality, and the active participation of freed African Americans during Reconstruction and “the (to his mind) catastrophic experiment in racial equality” (p. 19) that resulted. We are led on an exquisite intellectual history of how this view of white supremacy was justified in the most clear “objective science” that would, as Blatt states, “free…political and historical theory from abstraction” (p. 15) such as the possibility of political equality across racial and subsequently immigrant-ethnic lines. With the development of racialized understandings of white supremacy, recommendations regarding civil service examinations and limiting the franchise were fully justified. Blatt also helps us understand that these views of a dominant racial hierarchy were justified as scientific and were used to train many younger scholars in how they should pursue their own research.

This view—white supremacy justified on the basis of the immutability of racial difference—was predominant during the founding of the APSA and was explicitly stated by some of its early presidents, including Columbia’s Frank Goodnow and Lord James Bryce. It also structured much of the research and writing of Woodrow Wilson, who explained the lynching of African Americans and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as resulting from the misguided attempt during Reconstruction to bring Blacks and Whites together in society as political equals. Blatt contends that arguments for “efficiency” and “administration,” for which Wilson was an intellectual champion, were foundationally informed by understandings of racial hierarchy driven by white supremacy (p. 41). This view also pervaded many of the pages of both the Political Science Quarterly, the journal of the Columbia School of Political Science, and the new journal of the APSA, the American Political Science Review.

Blatt also discusses how these views were especially present in grounding understandings of how the United States could best meet its internationalist responsibilities, if not its ambitions for empire, by its success in expanding its global influence through the Spanish-American War and its aftermath. Wilson, known for his work in international affairs that led to the establishment of the League of Nations, was driven by an understanding of white supremacy in international affairs as well. This permeated many of the discussions of the early meetings of the APSA as international affairs became a more central part of political science in the United States. Even the establishment of the Journal of Race Development, which would change its name to the Journal of International Relations and would later be published under the current title of Foreign Affairs, was driven by a racial project even as it discussed the possibility of racial uplift. Constant references to “‘backward’ [and] ‘dependent’ races” (p. 76) are examples of how white supremacy and racial hierarchy were ever present.

The Chicago School of Political Science as organized by Charles E. Merriam and his star student Harold D. Lasswell, best known for bringing innovative methods of statistics and related scientific rigor to political science, was developed in service to racialized understandings of the essential units of political analysis and the necessary resulting political arrangements that flowed from such an understanding. Although, as Blatt argues, these political scientists did not try to justify the essentiality of racial differences, they nevertheless used the focus on the individual and group “‘averages’” (p. 93) to characterize this newer method of conducting political science as putatively more objective and scientific. Interestingly, although there were intellectual critiques of this view, they did not come from political scientists as much as they came from anthropologists such as Franz Boas. Political scientists struggled with being self-reflective regarding the continuing significance of white supremacy and racial hierarchy for their work, under the cover of supposedly objective science and its rigorous methods.

This veil of objectivity as it related to white supremacy was only further reinforced by the development of political behavior as an area of study, again driven by Merriam and others from the Chicago School. Blatt helps us understand how the development of major funders of political science research such as the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council was facilitated by influential political scientists’ embrace of psychological testing that began during World War II and later led to the development of IQ tests. Here Blatt seems to be more sympathetic to how a more systematic study of aspects of political behavior allowed for a focus on the individual, driven by a deep understanding of how individual behavior could be explained by fundamental psychological predispositions. However, it was still limited by understandings of white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

Although in the epilogue Blatt makes reference to how the origins of political science have placed limits on its capacity to engage directly with the ways that politics itself can structure racial hierarchy, I would have appreciated Blatt providing the profession with a stronger self-critique concerning the ongoing struggle to understand the consequences of our founding conceptual frameworks. Is not the purpose of political science to study not only groups but also power and the consequences of specific distributions of power for the attainment of equality and justice? Our origins as a discipline demonstrate clearly that we are driven as much by the questions we do not ask as by the questions that are the focus of our attention. What we learn from Blatt is that our profession has its origins in justifying white supremacy and the resulting racial hierarchy both in the United States and abroad. Whether justified in terms of the needs of stability, the inevitability of ethnoracial difference, the slow pace of the development of civil institutions in other countries, or the veil of scientism, ours is a profession that justifies not asking hard questions about the continuing presence of white supremacy and related racial hierarchy. This remains true even as our scientific methods become ever more technical and sophisticated. What Blatt allows us to consider are the ways that current dominant theories of political science and related methods still seem to avoid grappling with our complicity in the maintenance of the racialized origins of our republic. Sometimes the truth of who we are as a profession hurts. Nonetheless, it is through work such as Blatt’s that we gain a greater understanding of why we are as we are as a scholarly discipline. Let us hope that at some point we have the intellectual maturity, self-confidence, and humility to work harder than ever to overcome those origins and to help our nation and the world work to transform themselves to be more inclusive, responsive, and democratic than we have thus far been.

We certainly know the consequences of not having that maturity, self-confidence, and humility: we will remain a profession in which many of our most celebrated findings coexist with, if not perpetuate, a status quo of white supremacy and racial hierarchy to the disadvantage of segments of our own population, citizenry, and peoples around the world. Blatt helps us understand that our intellectual forefathers were more interested in justifying the privileged position of the powerful than in understanding the consequences of the exercise of that power on the attainment of justice and equality by many segments of our nation’s peoples. Perhaps Blatt’s work requires that we understand our profession as better characterized as privilege science than as political science. This book helps us understand ever more deeply the consequences of political scientists not having higher aspirations and expectations of what scientific truths our work can reveal to better our societies. It certainly is sad if at the turn of our most recent century, we are more similar than not to what we were at the turn of the last century. What is assured is that our profession is in control of what it chooses to contribute to overcoming the contemporary consequences of our nation’s and our profession’s origins. I am less sure that we are willing to accept the responsibilities of both exercising—or failing to exercise—that control.