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Race and the Making of American Political Science
AMERICAN GOVERNANCE: POLITICS, POLICY, AND PUBLIC LAW
Series Editors:
Richard Valelly, Pamela Brandwein, Marie Gottschalk, Christopher Howard
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Race and the Making of American Political Science
Jessica Blatt
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blatt, Jessica, 1970- author.
Title: Race and the making of American political science / Jessica Blatt.
Other titles: American governance.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: American governance: politics, policy, and public law | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017036428 | ISBN 9780812250046 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science—United States—History. | Race. | Political science—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States—History. | Racism—United States—History.
Classification: LCC JA84.U5 B49 2018 | DDC 320.0973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036428
For Rosa, Leo, and Sean
Contents
Chapter 1. “The White Man’s Mission”: John W. Burgess and the Columbia School of Political Science
Chapter 3. Twentieth-Century Problems: Administering an American Empire
Chapter 4. The Journal of Race Development: Evolution and Uplift
Introduction
A few years ago, the Journal of Theoretical Politics featured a startling announcement: The results of a new analysis of genetic and attitudinal data heralded “the end of ideology as we know it.” The philosophers, the implication went, having only interpreted ideology, had been missing the point. Science was finally poised to offer a rigorous, empirical account of its wellsprings. Our ideologies were in our genes.
Specifically, an interdisciplinary team from political science and behavioral genetics claimed to have shown that most conventionally understood sources of ideology were instead a “cultural veneer” overlaid on a “potentially divergent underlying structure of genetic differences.”1 Put simply, the idea was that in important instances our genes determine which of the available political preferences we are likely to choose. Even more simply, certain kinds of bodies are predisposed to certain kinds of politics.
The article (the title was, in fact, “It’s the End of Ideology as We Know It”) was part of a special issue dedicated to research on “genes and politics,” or what practitioners call “new empirical biopolitics.”2 This vein of political science research goes back to the 1970s but has only recently achieved greater visibility.3 A high point came when a 2005 article on the heritability of political attitudes made the cover of the American Political Science Review (APSR), the discipline’s flagship journal, and attracted a respectable amount of media attention.4 Since then, a small but prolific group of researchers has been claiming to identify genetic bases for our attraction to liberalism or conservatism; levels of social dominance; likelihood to join political parties, vote, or employ particular decision strategies; gender differences in political behavior; feelings of political efficacy; receptiveness to populism; negative attitudes toward out-groups; and even “Machiavellianism.”5
Much of this work is ambitious, calling on us to radically revise our understanding of political life. For one writer, the “shopworn,” “competing … paradigms of behavioralism and rational choice are in their last throes,” to be replaced by a new, “sociogenomic” synthesis.6 The APSR’s editor was particularly struck by the popular media attention accorded the 2005 cover article, musing that it might someday “emerge among the most important articles the APSR has ever published.”7 And while few political scientists have rushed to retrain in genetics, the continued appearance of work on the biology of politically relevant differences in respected political science journals suggests that other editors and peer reviewers remain interested in this approach.8
The 2005 study and others that followed
