While reading through an article I was reminded why I don't like political science. For one, it almost always has an ideological agenda which, as a "science," it shouldn't have, right? And I always find the conclusions and deductions, to be very opinion-driven. Take this example, fleshed out below: constructing an argument that politician X, rather than politician Y, is the true heir to a political thinker. Yet there's only a slight difference, and in either case there's no real intellectual lineage - just a descriptive statement. What's the real purpose? If you're tracing the tangible intellectual roots of a political movement, then you're doing essential historical work, and that does have academic value. If the historical or philosophical background provides some insight, then you're helping to keep the public informed and better able to make decisions. But all too often, in contemporary academic work, I see tenuous, and tedious, ideological, agenda-driven comparisons and "analysis" that pass because they are obscure and intellectual enough to seem like scholarship. Take this article, by a political science professor at BC. It starts:

To understand what is distinctive about today's Republican Party, you first need to know about an obscure and very conservative German political philosopher.

It then names two political philosopher contemporaries, Leo Strauss, who is widely credited as the forefather of the modern neoconservative movement, and Carl Schmitt, who I'm personally not familiar with. Strauss promoted a kind of authoritarian, and secretive democracy, administered by the elite. Schmitt on the other hand was nothing less than a modern-day Machievelli. He was also one of the founding thinkers of the European fascist movement and a member of the Nazi party to boot.

Schmitt ... joined the Nazi Party in 1933, survived World War II with his reputation relatively unscathed, and witnessed a revival of interest in his work, from both the left and the right, before his death in 1985 at the age of 96. Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi commitments, the left's continuing fascination with him is difficult to comprehend... ...Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics. "The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote

Between these two thinkers, which is closer to being the intellectual guru of the current administration? Schmitt, of course Why? I don't know:

Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis. "Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam," she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire."

Note that I'm talking about contemporary political science, not so much political theory and the great thinkers of the past.

Originally published 6/11/04