Crick Ber. The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions

Published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library. 2001. ISBN : 0-203-00141-9 (Master e-book ISBN). (269 pages). Series : International Library of Sociology : Political Sociology.
Origins - Conditions - Consequences - Inconclusions.This book is concerned with the idea of a science of politics as an episode and as a tendency in American political thought and intellectual history. It seeks to explain the special plausibility to American students of politics of the view that politics can be understood (and perhaps practised)
by ‘the method of the natural sciences’.
Here, then, is a critical history of an idea in a particular country, not of a discipline or profession. I do not pretend to give a history of American political science as a discipline, although because the idea has been, and may still be, the dominant one among the uniquely large body of American political scientists, many of the conditions for the remarkable growth both of the particular idea and of the wider discipline are the same. I am well aware that the hope to create an artificial science of politics upon natural principles is not uniquely or originally American. But nowhere has the idea achieved such power, vitality and great institutional and academic expression as in the United States during the last fifty years.