: The Study of Politics as a Vocation

This chapter argues that in the study of politics, numbers make a difference: a discipline with a hundred or so members must behave in a different way from one with over a thousand. It divides the century in the middle, in 1950, the date of the PSA’s founding. The first period, then, is one of gradual expansion to the small base from which the massive expansion of the second period was launched. The chapter traces through the implications of professionalization for the way in which politics is studied, looking at the relations among subdisciplines within the subject and relations between the discipline in Britain and in the rest of the world. Britain has scarcely embraced the project of modernism with enthusiasm, so there is less provocation to fuel postmodernism. Perhaps resistance to intellectual fashion will continue to be the distinctive British trait – for better and for worse.

: Nations and Nationalism in British Political Studies

This chapter attempts to provide a ‘reader’s guide’ to nationalism in British politics. It explores some of the major trends in the British study of nationalism and relates these to broader substantive and methodological concerns within the social sciences. The chapter focuses on most important comparative and conceptual studies of nationalism as a general political and historical phenomenon, rather than research limited to particular countries or periods. The defining features of British political studies, including a respect for methodological eclecticism and historically grounded research, have made British writers uniquely attuned to the importance of nationalism at times when many of their American colleagues dismissed it as the residuum of retarded modernization. The chapter concludes with some reflections on possible future directions for research and modest proposals for thinking about the study of nationalism and its relationship to broader debates within political science.

: Pluralism, Revenant or Recessive?

This chapter deals with pluralism, while tackling Ernest Barker, British pluralism, original pluralism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and feminism. The fact that British political science, particularly through the English language, is part of a far wider intellectual community, does not dilute its distinctiveness. It is one of the conditions enabling its different peoples to develop their own religious, political, and cultural identities. The chapter also describes three familiar metaphors used to explain intellectual change. Pluralism is neither socialist, nor conservative, nor liberal, although it has affinities at different points with all three. It even sits uneasily on a scale of left to right. Its reappearance indicates how far the old morphology of political thinking has been transcended.

: Visions of Freedom

This chapter considers four of the most influential visions that characterized the response to totalitarianism, and in particular the various concepts of limit they provide, since those are the basis of the opposition which each vision sought to oppose to the totalitarian ideal. The first vision is the positivist one of Karl Popper, for whom the logic of scientific method offers the only genuine knowledge of man and society. The second great vision is that of Berlin, who abandons positivism and instead presents the human condition in tragic terms, on the grounds that it is intrinsically characterized by a plurality of incommensurable and conflicting values. A third vision situates positivism in a naturalistic portrait of the human condition. Finally, there is the ‘civil’ vision of Michael Oakeshott, which is ultimately grounded in a radical, anti-reductionist conception of human freedom.

: Contextual and Non-Contextual Histories of Political Thought

This chapter focuses on how the history of political ideas has been approached in the context of British political science. This has the consequence that the discussion ranges over commentators who are explicitly not historians. It claims that the current British approaches to the study of past political thought have domestic origins in the development of the study of politics in British Universities, especially Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. The first section accounts for different approaches to the study of political ideas in British political science by examining conceptions of the history of political thought. It shows how institutional history is connected to the development of a genre, and how this history has not been dependent on the direct import of Continental or American intellectual fashions or personalities. The second section delineates the three main British approaches to the study of the history of political ideas in the post-war period.

: A British School of International Relations

After considering the vexed question of whether it is possible to speak of a collective identity shared by scholars working in Britain, this chapter examines the debate surrounding the birth of international relations in the aftermath of the First World War. It discusses the arguments mobilized by E. H. Carr against the so-called idealists. This leads into a discussion of the evolution of a distinctive voice in British international relations that sought to overcome the realist–idealist dualism which defined what has become known as the first ‘great debate’. The conclusion briefly considers how far contemporary thinking on international relations builds on this attempt to set out an agenda that was both different from politics as traditionally conceived, and different from international relations as pursued in the United States.

: British Public Administration

This chapter discusses three possible interpretations of the development of British Public Administration over the twentieth century as a way of assessing its contribution to political science. Those interpretations are respectively labelled ‘dodo’, ‘phoenix’, and ‘chameleon’. The ‘dodo’ interpretation is a pessimistic fin de siècle view of British Public Administration as in serious decline from early promise and former greatness. The ‘phoenix’ interpretation is a more optimistic perception of the subject as advancing in scientific rigour and conceptual sophistication over the century, leaving behind the outmoded styles of the past. A third view, the ‘chameleon’ interpretation, is a picture of lateral transformation, with the adoption of new intellectual colouring and markings to fit a new era.

: The Analysis of British Political Institutions

The analysis of British political institutions in the twentieth century has not emerged solely from the writing of textbooks by political scientists. The genesis of general thinking about the government of the United Kingdom is to a lesser degree the product of professional reflection than is the development of theories about comparative government. It evolves more directly from the political process itself and from the controversies about government that government itself generates. This chapter discusses the powers of Parliament, the nature of cabinet government, the accountability of ministers, the dignified institutions, the re-modelling of Dicey’s institution, political institutions and public inquiry, and theory and analysis in political institutions.

: Electoral Systems, Elections and Public Opinion

Throughout the twentieth century, the content and focus of British research on elections and public opinion was influenced by the changing political agenda of the day, but its quantity and style were more influenced by economic and technical factors: the increasing availability of funds and rapid advances in the technology of research, particularly from the 1960s onwards. What distinguished the end of the century from the start was not so much the accumulated store of knowledge about electoral behaviour and public opinion, important though that was, but an ability to investigate quickly, easily, frequently, and in great detail, which simply did not exist at the start. Electoral research on Britain and by Britons was fully up to international standards in concept and method and was well integrated with research elsewhere.

: Pressure Groups and Parties

The central paradox in reviewing the contribution of British political scientists to the understanding of these intermediary institutions is that both the number of scholars and the output have been considerable, yet the international impact has been relatively modest. Two explanations seem plausible. First, with a few notable exceptions, the centre of gravity of these studies has coincided with the centre of gravity of British political science as a whole – it is largely atheoretical in its research style. A second possible explanation is that studies in these fields have tended to focus on activities (of groups and social movements) or on office-holding (parties) and have been much less interested in power as a concept. Relatively little is known about the effects that this activity has on outcomes in terms of public policy or the distribution of power in society.