Steven White, a Poli Sci Ph.D student uptown at Columbia, takes issue with my dismissal of political science as a discipline. But I think political science is a fine and noble discipline! It’s just that I feel like viewing politics through a purely analytical lens is going to obfuscate just as much as it illuminates. An analytical approach has a lot of value, but like a non-analytical approach, it only gets you so far.

More to the point, I wasn’t talking about the discipline of political science, I was talking about the Politics department. The distinction between “department” and “discipline” is important, but the one between “politics” and “political science” is even more so. I had been led, maybe unreasonably, to believe that the Politics department had a fairly interdisciplinary approach. Instead, we ended up approaching things through a limited lens that quickly went from “slightly grating” to “downright creepy.”

Here’s a good example: There was a unit on torture in the class - yes, torture. We read a piece for the class denouncing the horrendous incursions on human rights being made by the Bush administration, and enabled by John Yoo and David Addington, among others. Sounds good so far, but after that one reading, the article was barely addressed at all - instead, we skipped straight to a sort of war game scenario of how Congress would block torture, how the president would try to permit it, and what the median result would be.

It struck me at some point during this whole process, that:

A.) We were deliberately skirting around some very important legal and moral questions about torture.

B.) I guess out of a desire to avoid that sort of debate, we ended up with this weird assumed moral equivalency between “not torturing people” and “torturing the shit out of people.” Similarly, since the central thesis of the whole class was that both parties had drifted to equal extremes, there was an implicit assumption that “not torturing people” and maybe even “only torturing people a little bit” was some kind of kooky left-wing idea.

C.) If we actually wanted to test our analytical models, it turns out that Congress has passed some real, not hypothetical legislation on torture that was also curiously ignored.

All of which reduced what is, in the real world, a fascinating and extremely important fight into a strangely antiseptic and irrelevant exercise.

But that’s not supposed to reflect on the entire field of political science. Even the professor whose class I’m critiquing has done some interesting and important work in that area. It’s just that we need to remember that the reason why it’s important is because it concerns processes that occur in the real world and have very real-world consequences. And that means that people interested in political science, like people interested in any field concerning real-world issues, should probably study other things related to it as well. Or, as Steven himself says:

There’s also a secondary point here as well, which is that it’s possible that the standard introduction to American politics classes need to be restructured and made more interesting and relevant. Too much focus on models and theoretical frameworks in an introductory class can have the downside of simply turning young people interested in politics off from political science. I of course agree that the two are, in a sense, different things, but I wouldn’t mind seeing at least a little more overlap at times.

Photo by Flickr user the Frankfurt School used under a Creative Commons license.