Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy

Extract

Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy. By John G. Gunnell. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 289p. $40.00.

John Gunnell laments the ignorance of our own past in political science and is determined to get us to understand the richness of earlier generations of political scientists and theorists who focused on the American incarnation of democracy. The key task of this book is to examine the discipline's understanding of democracy, with a focus on the conversations surrounding conceptions of the state, liberalism, and, especially, pluralism. On this, Gunnell offers a comprehensive and enlightening history of some of the central defining discourses of political science and political theory, interwoven with discussions of how this history relates to the development of political science as a discipline.