THE POESIS OF A DISCIPLINARY METAMORPHOSIS: RHETORIC AND AMBITION IN AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE AFTER WORLD WAR II Cover Image

THE POESIS OF A DISCIPLINARY METAMORPHOSIS: RHETORIC AND AMBITION IN AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE AFTER WORLD WAR II
THE POESIS OF A DISCIPLINARY METAMORPHOSIS: RHETORIC AND AMBITION IN AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE AFTER WORLD WAR II

Author(s): Liisi Keedus
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Political Sciences, History and theory of political science
Published by: Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus
Keywords: American political science; political behavioralism; history of political thought; 20th century political ideas; history of social sciences; history of interdisciplinary studies; Chicago school;

Summary/Abstract: Abstract. The emergence of contemporary political science as a rigorously analytical and empirically based discipline is most commonly dated back to its remaking in the United States after World War II. This article highlights and explores the role of various components of rhetorical strategies deployed in the articulation and presentation of this new political science. In addition reshaping the terminological apparatus with which the ‘revolutionaries’ presented their own endeavours and those of their ‘traditionalist’ predecessors, the case for reforming the discipline was further boosted by the formulation of fantasies of interdisciplinarity as a shortcut to an unprecedented empowering of social knowledge, as well as by utterances of ambitions of the future social role of this new type of science – all three as discursive strategies in their own right.

  • Issue Year: XXII/2018
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 3-23
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: English