The Tragedies of Political Science: The Politics of Research Assessment in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The Tragedy of Political Science is the title of a 1984 book by David Ricci that made a bold argument concerning the evolution of the discipline. Ricci’s thesis, put simply, suggested that as political science had become more ‘professionalised’ throughout the twentieth century so it had also become less relevant, more verbose, less engaged, more impenetrable, increasingly distant from practitioners of politics and the public. The discipline had simply not lived up to the high hopes of C. Wright Mills for the social sciences – as set out in The Sociological Imagination (1959) – but had, if anything, become ensnared in a trap of its own making. In 1967 the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) was created in the United States in order to encourage social engagement and activism amongst political scientists in direct rejection of the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) commitment to political neutrality and refusal to engage in major social debates. The ‘tragedy’ as both David Ricci and the CNPS argued was that at a historical point when American society desperately needed the evidence and insights that political science could deliver the discipline apparently either did not want to engage or had little to say. Political science – to paraphrase C. Wright Mills – had failed to deliver on its early promise.