6 - Discordant voices: American histories of political thought

Summary

To survey the varied array of approaches to the history of political thought in the United States since the Second World War is too tall an order to fill in a single chapter. So I shall simply highlight a number of topics, themes, approaches and ‘schools’ that have been variously in vogue over the past half-century or so, illustrating each with especially noteworthy examples. I shall begin by considering the institutional site in which American historians of political thought typically work – namely, departments of political science – and how this has affected the approaches they adopt. I then consider a number of defining themes and moments, both inside and outside the American academy. Outside, the threats of fascist and communist totalitarianism, the Holocaust and the Cold War, the ‘end of ideology’ debate, the Vietnam War and the rise of the New Left, the black and women's liberation movements, and a resurgent conservatism; inside, the profound impact of European, and especially German-Jewish, émigrés, McCarthyism and the loyalty oath controversies, the ‘behavioural revolution’ in political science, the rise of positivism, the anti-behaviouralist and anti-positivist backlash, and the emergence of feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, and other influential perspectives.

As an academic subject, the history of political thought is typically studied in departments of political science, where it is classified under the larger heading of political theory – or, as the American Political Science Association designates it, ‘Political Theory: Normative and Historical’. This designation separates and segregates this sort of political theory from ‘Political Theory: Empirical and Analytic’.