Barrow Clyde. The Intellectual Origins of New Political Science

In 1967, the burgeoning discontent of many political scientists culminated in the establishment of the Caucus for a New Political Science. The Caucus included political scientists of many diverse viewpoints, but it was united methodologically by a critique of behavioralism and by the idea that political science should abandon the myth of a value-free science. In recent years, political scientists have authored numerous commentaries on the trajedy of political science, the crisis in political science, and the flight from reality in political science, while in 2000 these discontents resurfaced in the perestroika rebellion, which again denounced the APSA as an organization that promotes a narrow parochialism and methodological bias toward the quantitative, behavioral, rational choice, statistical, and formal modeling approaches. This paper reviews the intellectual origins of New Political Science by examing some of the major works of the late 1960s and early 1970s purporting to establish the foundations of a new political science. It concludes that new political science offers a methodological critique of behaviorialism and a sociological critique of the relationship between political science and political power, but there is no consensus on what constitutes a new political science beyond its critical stance toward the existing discipline.