American Government, 1933–1963: Fission and Confusion in Theory and Research1

In a revolutionary century political science as a discipline has been transformed along with its subject matter. In no more than a generation the discipline has gone through at least three theoretical ages, from a naive Jeffersonianism to a mongrelized Madisonianism to a kind of liberal Burkeanism. It has been going through still another transformation in methodology. The failure of one democratic institution after another has bred uncertainty, and uncertainty has encouraged a vast expansion of the apparatus of inquiry. Even if all the questions might be found in the Great Books, the quest is new—for conditions rather than truths, for degrees rather than absolutes.