How do you talk about the disciplinary foundations of political science in the United States without talking about race and scientific racism? You do not, according to Jessica Blatt’s Race and the Making of American Political Science. In this tightly written account of the foundations of political science as an academic discipline, Blatt ties together political science’s desire for legitimacy among policy makers with an instrumental use of the methods and often the tenets of scientific racism. In so doing, she offers new levels of detail about the precepts of the discipline.
This focus is similar to previous works like Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. The two books differ, however, in their approach. Eze allows the audience to read celebrated theorists of scientific racism like Immanuel Kant in their own words, inviting readers to more critically engage the entirety of a thinker’s ideas. Blatt’s book brings together the intentions of such thinkers with a consideration of their tangible impact on political science as a fledgling discipline.
Although she starts and ends with contemporary research in genetic approaches to politics, Blatt centers her analysis on the turn of twentieth century, with significant attention to “how racial ideas figured” (p. 5) in the context of a new academic field and the work of academic entrepreneurs seeking to cement political science’s status as a putatively scientific scholarly enterprise. Examining the record of John Burgess, William Dunning, Charles Merriam, and other academic entrepreneurs, the author turns away from a “silence in the face of great accomplishment” approach to reveal the ways in which supposed racial differences were simultaneously embraced as a central part of political science’s ontological origins and hypocritically dismissed as ephemera that could be conceptually separated from the methods that supposedly confirmed them.
As political science evolved over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was both a product and harbinger of a post-Reconstruction United States that grappled with Jim Crow. Indeed, one of Burgess’s most powerful claims for civil service exams was its ability to provide a convincing and objective “theory of human difference” that would preserve the racial status quo of white domination. The “scientific turn” in eugenics and race difference studies proved irresistible to political scientists seeking to win friends and influence people in a way that would grant them access to the halls of power. Blatt quite convincingly reveals the way in which the quest for innovation and “progress” in how to study politics was bound up with the quest for political influence on topics as broad as bureaucratic efficiency, colonial administration, and domestic politics.
This focus on preservation of the status quo was indeed the most intriguing and also the disturbing revelation of the book. The preservationist intent of political science to maintain the colonial racial hierarchy internationally in light of new circumstances, which is to say in light of mobilization to end colonial domination in places like India and to rationalize continued imperialist aspirations in the Philippines, rings clear throughout each chapter.
The tension between the desire for preservation of the current political order and the discipline’s valorization of “progress” is an important question left mostly unaddressed throughout the book. The shared racialist underpinnings of what today would be characterized as the more liberal and the more conservative elements of the discipline are deeply caught up in a definition of “progress” that is grounded in an “evolutionary understanding of racial difference.” The author is mostly content to mention that the founders of political science departments on both coasts laid the intellectual groundwork for ethnic cleansing and genocide while debating the merits of colonial administration versus colonial autonomy in rival journals. The epilogue splits the difference without delving into the tension itself. Blatt herself describes the situation this way: “Certainly people in this milieu often endorsed the idea that racial differences were inherent and that African Americans and other racialized groups were probably or certainly inferior to Anglo-Saxons in at least some ways. At the same time, I have noted that many of them seem not to have been especially committed to white supremacist ideology as a political stance” (p. 139).
To be crystal clear, I am not suggesting that the author sympathizes with the racism and racialism discussed in this book. Rather, she seems to equate intent with effect in a way that limits the ability to critically consider the impact of such a racialist origin story on the evolution of the discipline and on many contemporary questions of equity and access today. Such tension is exactly what this discipline needs to explore at this time in our nation’s history.
The articulation of the relationship between the scientific turn of the 1920s, race difference, racism, and its material impact is frequently framed as if it is largely beside the point. But I cannot help but wonder about how political science’s engagement and subsequent dismissal of Boas’s anthropological work—as an example of a compelling alternative methodology—were intentional choices of Burgess, Merriam, and other figures. Early political scientists’ refusal to engage with rigorous empirical scholarship proving exactly the opposite point about the racial status quo, specifically the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, is likewise a reflection of intent with tremendous impact. Within the very same literature of race difference and during the exact time period covered by Blatt’s book, Du Bois conducted the Atlanta University Studies and wrote The Philadelphia Negro. He wrote about these studies in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 1903. Our discipline’s decision to embrace select methods within the racial difference literature that happened to preserve the status quo is surely more than an innocent mistake or oversight.
Blatt contends that “race science appealed not so much as proof positive of white superiority but as a possible means to satisfy long-standing, internal demands for empiricism, rigor, and real-world applicability within political science. Moreover, it was also suited to—and indeed was implicated in the construction of—a new institutional landscape” (p. 140). This tension between preservation of the racial status quo and a professed interest in scientific progress illuminates another important question worthy of consideration: Can one separate a methodology from the original subject of such a methodology? Here I question the ontological assumption that there can be a conceptual distinction between the subject matter of racial hierarchies / difference and the methodologies that were designed to confirm such hierarchies.
This question is worthy of significant consideration after reading Race and the Making of American Political Science. To be sure, experimental methodologies were not discarded completely by psychology after the Milgram or the Stanford prison experiments. The Nuremberg Code, however, was introduced in 1947 following some of the most egregious transgressions in the basic implementation of that methodology. In the United States, additional regulations were added in 1974 with the National Research Act in the United States, which established Institutional Review Boards.
But what can we say has been the redress for the race difference underpinnings of political science? Where have we corrected as a discipline for the persistent inequalities and discriminatory impact of these foundations in our research? Going beyond the idea of a set of regulations as redress, it seems to me that the insights of critical race theory, feminist theory, and intersectionality help us in setting the standard that it is no longer sufficient to simply suggest that the focus of a methodology is an accident of history with no bearing on that methodology. Race and the Making of American Political Science can bring us to an important reflection about current evolutionary and neurobiological approaches within political science through both its strong American political development analysis and its conceptual gaps. Like most institutional developments, the evolution of political science in the earliest part of its disciplinary formation was as much about consolidation of power and influence as it was about any notion of progress. Foregrounding that conversation for political scientists in the years to come is therefore this book’s greatest contribution.
