04 ISSUE I
DECEMBER 2024
DECEMBER 2024
The Disciplines of Race
The academic disciplines of political science and international relations have their roots in pseudo-scientific ideas
about racial difference.
about racial difference.
By Nikki Veltkamp
The immediate context for the beginning of American political science was that of a nation recovering from the Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction (1863–1877). Thus, from its beginnings, American political science treated race as a scientific and biological concept crucial to understanding American politics. Both race and history had to be framed in scientific terms, which led to the naturalization of both ideas. This mattered not only for political science but also for the related discipline of international relations.
The story of race’s centrality in American political science's origins and early development is told in “Race and the Making of American Political Science,” the 2018 book by Jessica Blatt. A professor of politics at Marymount-Manhattan College, her book guides you through the emergence of American political science as a field and a discipline, detailing the numerous academics and politicians that shaped the focus on race as a scientific concept.
Blatt’s story starts with John W. Burgess, founder of the first graduate school in political science at Columbia University in 1880. Originally from the South, he was an outright white supremacist. He published harsh critiques of Reconstruction, which was aimed at extending political rights to former slaves and reintegrating former Confederate states and their supporters into the Union. As a result, his racist and deterministic views shaped the field. Although later scholars distanced themselves from Burgess’s deterministic approach to developing the “Anglo-Saxon” or white population, figures like Woodrow Wilson retained his ideas on racial hierarchy. Wilson later served as US President from 1913 to 1921 and played a crucial role in founding the League of Nations. As a political scientist, Wilson’s wanted to shift to a more pragmatic approach, focusing on installing administrative institutions to maintain racial order. This practical view of politics was also applied to managing America’s colonies, such as the Philippines.
Early on, American political scientists clearly distinguished how they perceived African Americans and colonized populations. In the U.S., societal tensions were often blamed on African Americans, with whites portrayed as “having to deal” with them, as seen in instances of lynchings. Conversely, American political scientists viewed colonized populations, such as those in the Philippines, with more paternalism and less blame.
By the early 1900s, American political science had become sufficiently institutionalized (the American Political Science Association was founded in 1903) and developed its own journals. One was the “Journal of Race Development,” founded in 1910. The new association and its publications deepened the reliance on scientific conceptions of race. For example, a JRD article by psychologist G. Stanley Hall, its first editor, presented his version of the theory of “recapitulationism,” comparing the supposedly underdeveloped “savages” to “children.” Similarly, geographer Ellsworth Huntington claimed to make findings on the relationship between race and the evolutionary dynamics of geography to justify the inferiority of certain races.
In the 1920s, Charles E. Merriam from the Chicago School used scientific research to focus on political science’s supposed purpose: understanding pluralism. In contrast to earlier thinkers influenced by Burgess, while race remained a relevant concept for political scientists like Merriam, it became too broad and essentialist to address the complexities of pluralism. Despite this shift, social hierarchies persisted, now based on new scientific measurement techniques, such as the psychological testing conducted in the army. Interestingly, the post-World War I period also saw the emergence of more critical thinkers like the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who introduced a constructivist approach that separated biological from social aspects of race and identity.
Overall, I found it impressive how Blatt displays the common thread of race thinking in American political science and practice. It was hard to read about the horrendous white supremacist perceptions that infiltrated American academia for so long. Blatt’s writing made me reflect on how the foundations of American political science are rooted in a perspective that failed to look at the creation of structural inequality and instead continued to look to scientific justifications for societal differences. Blatt tells a fascinating story, displaying how race was the primary abstraction that dictated the development of political science as a discipline in the United States.
Nikki Veltkamp is completing an MA in International Affairs at The New School.