Political Values and Professional Values: The Recognition of Conflict in Both as Essential to Education in Political Science

Extract

Academicians are properly suspicious of efforts to characterize all the intellectual currents of a decade by a single phrase. But perhaps our less cautious friends in journalism are not so far wrong in suggesting that we are returning in the 1970s to the conservatism of the 1950s. The first edition of The Politics of American Democracy (1959) was denounced by a John Birch group in California for its left-wing orientation. The only previous broadside attack on the book to appear in print was directed at the third and fourth editions (1965, 1968); this attack, which appeared in a 1970 issue of the Newsletter of the Caucus for a New Political Science, denounced the book for its right-wing, pro-system biases. Now we have come full circle and find the fifth (1971) edition denounced because “spokesmen of the left seem to have been given more than equal time.” In some respects we are gratified to think Mr. Stevens' critique must prove we have not grown more conservative with each edition, and we shall certainly display his comments to our children, nieces, nephews, junior colleagues, and students.

More seriously, however, we cannot be gratified to have our scholarship and our integrity impugned. We do not wish to overreact, but the charge that we are guilty of “bizarre statements of ‘fact’ and misrepresentations of the academic literature” and the suggestion that we “can no longer claim to be speaking as … political scientists[s]” can hardly be interpreted to mean that we have merely slipped into occasional error.