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Political Science Then and Now: Thoughts on Henry Jones Ford

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Erwin C. Hargrove
Erwin C. Hargrove*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

I remember an afternoon graduate seminar in 1958 at Yale when Bob Dahl asked a question: “How would we best go about ‘testing’ the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America?” Two answers were offered. “Survey research can do it all,” many argued. I put my hand up and offered an alternative. We would do well to study American history, the culture of politics, and political sociology, then and now. One does not “test” Tocqueville all at once, and never fully. One continually matches his insights against what one knows and understands about our politics. Dahl accepted both answers and we then went on to other things. I recalled the question when I recently reread Ford.

Ford, along with James Bryce, was one of the first political scientists to attempt an analysis of the central dynamics of American political institutions. In The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), he set a model followed by Arthur Bentley, Arthur Holcombe, Wilfred Binkley, Pendleton Herring, D.W. Brogan, and Clinton Rossiter, all leaders in American political science. The art was to write a perceptive book about U.S. politics that was grounded primarily in historical materials and analyzed the connections among society, politics, and government.

Type
Time Capsule
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 231 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1999

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