THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF NEW POLITICAL SCIENCE

In 1967, the burgeoning discontent of many political scientists culminated in the establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science. The Caucus included political scientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it was united methodologically by a critique of behavioralism and by the idea that political science should abandon the myth of a value-free science. In recent years, political scientists have authored numerous commentaries on “the tragedy” of political science, “the crisis” in political science, and “the flight from reality in political science,” while in 2000 these discontents resurfaced in the “perestroika” rebellion, which again denounced the American Political Science Association as an organization that promotes a “narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches.” This paper reviews the intellectual origins of New Political Science by examining some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970...