The Rediscovery of the State:
Crisis and Knowledge Production in Postwar Political Science
Book manuscript in progress
This project is a critical disciplinary history of American political science focusing on the intersection between discourses of the state, the politics of liberal democracy, and the production of social scientific knowledge. It examines how the political and theoretical horizon of postwar liberalism in the United States was channeled into the political science discipline, through changing understandings and usages of the state as a theoretical concept.
The revival of interest in the state happened after it previously fell out of favor as an explanatory concept during the heyday of behavioral and structural-functionalist explanations. Tracing the intellectual history behind this renewed interest, I argue that the “rediscovery” of the state that followed from out of the 1970s was motivated by the search for a more critical standpoint from which the relationship between the American state and the social sciences could be reframed and problematized.
I situate this intellectual turn within the general crisis of the postwar liberal-democratic model that began in the late 1960s and lasted through the 1970s. Unlike pluralist models that stressed consensus, the newfound focus on the state provided a conceptual means for new investigations of phenomena like power inequalities, revolution, and capitalist development in a way that had previously been neglected. This rediscovery of the state was influenced by the appropriation of neo-Marxist debates about the capitalist state that were concurrently developing in Western Europe. Returning to this largely forgotten body of scholarship from the 1970s, I argue that it played a crucial role as an interlocutor for the “neo-statist” and historical institutionalist revival in sociology and political science from the 1980s to the present.
By reconstructing this transitional moment in the political science discipline from the 1960s to the 1980s, this project contributes the intellectual history of American liberalism and the social sciences, to democratic theory, and to current debates about the relationship between liberal democracy and political science. It speaks to contemporary audiences concerned with the pathologies of liberal capitalism (including neoliberalism and populism), by using the preceding turbulent period in U.S. history to show how American political science has grappled with the tension between liberalism and the modern state. It argues that discourses about the state are an irreducible component of democratic politics, both in theory and in practice, that need to be reexamined light of today's challenges, expectations, and limits.
Published research connected to the project can be read here:
-
"Studying the State: The Legacy of the Committee on States and Social Structures" (Items, 2020)
-
"Bringing What State Back In? Neo-Marxism and the Origin of the Committee on States and Social Structures" (Political Research Quarterly, 2019)
