¹Whitman College

^*For helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay, I wish to thank Paul Apostolidis, Michael Brintnall, and Dvora Yanow.

Abstract

American students of political science have repeatedly bemoaned its failure to achieve the status of a coherent intellectual discipline. This essay suggests that claims regarding the disarray of political science are, at the very least, exaggerated. For several key purposes, the profession ascribes near totemic status to four specific subfields: political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. While one might argue that these categories are innocuous administrative conveniences, that claim would be mistaken. Subfields are vehicles of power insofar as they participate in the allocation of rewards within the discipline, and, more fundamentally, insofar as they participate in structuring our understanding of the nature of politics itself. Inquiry into the emergence and consolidation of political science's basic subfields, however, has been almost entirely ignored in accounts of the discipline and its history. This essay aims to remedy that gap in our understanding.