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The Changing Shape of Burnham’s Political Universe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Richard Jensen
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Extract

The discipline of political science deliberately abandoned history sixty years ago. In a quest for a true “science” of politics, it turned to physics and especially psychology for models of what a science ought to be like (Jensen, 1969). Rigor in defining and measuring variables and in the statement of theories and testing of hypotheses was sought, plus a method that could predict, and thus control, the future. History seemed unnecessary, for the terrible cataclysm of the Great War seemed to have erased or smothered the impact of the past. It would take political scientists a half century to rediscover history, and the goal of this paper is to examine the route of one of their most important explorers of the past, Walter Dean Burnham.

Type
Walter Dean Burnham and the Dynamics of American Politics
Information
Social Science History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 1986 , pp. 209 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1986 

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