Revolutions Without Enemies: Key Transformations in Political Science JOHN S. DRYZEK Australian National University

A merican political science is a congenitally unsettled discipline, witnessing a number of movements / designed to reorient its fundamental character. Four prominent movements are compared here: ^ A the statism accompanying the discipline 's early professionalization, the pluralism of the late 1910s and early 1920s, behavioralism, and the Caucus for a New Political Science (with a brief glance at the more recent Perestroika). Of these movements, only the first and third clearly succeeded. The discipline has proven very hard to shift. Despite the rhetoric that accompanied behavioralism, both it and statism were revolutions without enemies within the discipline (other than those appearing after they succeeded), and therein lies the key to their success. Many have tried to change the character of American political science, but few have suc ceeded. The revolutionaries in question are those who have sought in a group enterprise to set the agenda for the discipline in conscious rejection of most or all of what has gone before. In these terms, the discipline has seen five revolutionary movements. (Proclamation and establishment of a new research program, such as structural functionalism or biopoli tics, does not qualify, and paradigm shift in Kuhn's [1962] sense is generally not an appropriate frame.) First came those who founded the discipline in the late nineteenth century as a professionalized state-building science in a seemingly recalcitrant polity?and against amateur political analysis. Next came the pluralists, who in the early twentieth century took up arms against the monistic state and its disciplinary handmaiden. Third came the behavioralists of the mid-twentieth cen tury, who revolted on behalf of the study of actual be havior, science, the political system (as opposed to the state), and (again) pluralism. Fourth came the Caucus for a New Political Science in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which rejected behavioralism's alleged complic ity in the status quo of American politics in favor of a politically committed political science oriented to the social crisis of the times. Fifth came the Perestroika movement of the early twenty-first century, targeted against perceived hegemony of formal and quantita tive approaches, in favor of methodological pluralism, qualitative inquiry, and again an orientation to pressing public problems. Because Minerva's owl has yet to take flight over Perestroika, I will say little about it, but of the previ ous four movements, only two succeeded. A successful revolution may be defined in terms of resetting the discipline's agenda, as validated by the recognition of practitioners, whether or not they shared the move ment's commitments. Practitioners then have to posi tion themselves in relation to the new understanding, even if they do not share it. Success must be recognized as such; this may seem like an obvious criterion, yet it