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C H A P T E R S I X The Political Science Discipline: A Comment on David Laitin IN “The Political Science Discipline,” David Laitin argues that there is an intellectual order to political science, but he laments that it is not reflected in the way in which we teach the discipline to undergraduates.1 He proposes to remedy this state of affairs by designing an introductory political science course that mirrors standard introductory courses in economics. For reasons that are explained below, I believe that his perception of disciplinary order is illusory and that his prescriptions are pernicious. Laitin makes a number of valid points and proposes a creditable introductory political science course. We should not favor its becoming the introductory course in the discipline any more than we should favor instituting the French system of secondary education in American high schools. Whatever benefits might be derived from the Minister of Education ’s knowing that the same chapter from the same text is being taught at the same time of day to children from Dieppe to Marseilles come at a considerable cost in terms of diversity and intellectual competition , investment by teachers in what they teach, and other wellknown advantages of local knowledge. What holds for secondary education holds more obviously, to my mind, with the teaching of political science to undergraduates. In this field, however much Laitin might wish it were otherwise, there is little agreement about what to study and how to study it—let alone agreement on a body of established 1 David D. Laitin, “The Political Science Discipline,” in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson , ed., The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and Inquiry in American Politics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), pp. 11–40. T H E P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E D I S C I P L I N E 205 findings that can canned into an introductory course for all. All methods of studying politics have limitations; we should be forthright about this in our teaching as well as in our research. Laitin’s approach is wrongheaded for two sets of reasons. The first have to do with his taking the economics profession as a model for what should be done in political science, and his related aspiration to see done for Political Science what Samuelson did for Economics. This strikes me as resting on an erroneous conception of the role of introductory economics courses in the economics discipline. The second failing of Laitin’s approach concerns his menu for the division of the discipline into political theory, political institutions, comparative politics, and international relations. This is a plausible way to organize a course, but it is also challengeable—as is every possible way of doing so—for reasons that can be found in Laitin’s essay. I conclude with some additional remarks on why fostering a plurality of introductory courses makes better sense for political science than does Laitin’s proposal. ECONOMICS: A MODEL OF WHAT NOT TO DO Political scientists are sometimes criticized for breathlessly chasing after ideas that economists are about to abandon. I think there is merit to this critique, but it is not my central point here. Rather, it is that an important difference between the way in which political science and economics are taught to undergraduates is that political scientists generally try to link introductory teaching to the debates at the frontiers of the discipline (as Laitin’s model syllabus reflects), whereas economists do not. The introductory economics course seems to me to be a kind of LSAT for aspiring economists: a device to create barriers to entry that will filter out students who do not have mathematical minds and to teach a few elementary ideas about price theory. It has virtually nothing to do with what is going on at the frontiers of the economics discipline. If one looks through journals such as the American Economic Review and the others I receive regularly as a paid-up member of the American Economics Association, perhaps the most striking fact is that the frontiers of economics research, while perhaps not quite as anarchic as the frontiers of political science research, are a lot more similar than political science stereotypes of economists (whether or not envy-based) would lead you to imagine. The merits of rational choice models are [3.141.244.201] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 21:29...

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