Description
Book SynopsisThis book situates the origins of American political science in relation to the transatlantic history of liberalism. In a corrective to earlier accounts, it argues that, as political science took shape in the nineteenth century American academy, it did more than express a pre-existing American liberalism. The pioneers of American political science participated in transatlantic networks of intellectual and political elites that connected them directly to the vicissitudes of liberalism in Europe. The book shows how these figures adapted multiple contemporary European liberal arguments to speak to particular challenges of mass democratic politics and large-scale industry as they developed in America. Political science''s pioneers in the American academy were thus active agents of the Americanization of liberalism. When political science first secured a niche in the American academy during the antebellum era, it advanced a democratized classical liberal political vision overlapping with th
Trade ReviewThis work is an important contribution, and corrective, to the study of the widely acknowledged but variously conceived and much debated intersection between liberalism and the evolution of the social sciences in the United States. Adcock carefully and concretely examines the European sources of liberalism and how these ideas affected the development of American political science, which in turn played a significant role in Americanizing liberalism. Adcock has a deep and broad knowledge of the subject matter, and his work represents the best of a generation of innovative scholarship on the history of the social and political sciences. * John G. Gunnell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Albany *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. American Political Science and Liberalism in Transatlantic Perspective ; Part One: From Europe to America ; Chapter One. The Political in Political Science: The Liberal Debate about Democracy ; Chapter Two. The Science in Political Science: The Historicist Debate about Method ; Chapter Three. Democratized Classical Liberalism in the Antebellum American College: The Emigre Political Science of Francis Lieber ; Part Two: Wide Political Science and Liberalism in the Gilded Age ; Chapter Four. Political Science and Political Economy in the Age of Academic Reform: Andrew Dickson White and William Graham Sumner ; Chapter Five. Historical and Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University: Historicist Science, Liberalism, and the Founding of National Associations ; Part Three: Late Century Liberalisms and the New Political Science ; Chapter Six. Disenchanted Classical Liberalism as a Political Vision: William Graham Sumner and A. Lawrence Lowell ; Chapter Seven. Progressive Liberalism as a Political Vision: Woodrow Wilson's Political Science ; Chapter Eight. The Transatlantic Study of Modern Political Systems: The New Political Science of James Bryce, A. Lawrence Lowell, and Frank Goodnow ; Conclusion. The Americanization of Political Science and the Americanization of <"Liberalism>"
