...And the practice of political science, too

Since last night, I have received no fewer than 12 messages and notices about some amendment to cut NSF funding to political science on the grounds that, basically, it's not a science (not entirely untrue...). This has apparently inspired great outrage and mobilization among political scientists who take the suggestion that they're even lamer than CNN quite badly and also enjoy receiving government moneyz (mobilization, payment-induced participation--all phenomena that have probably been studied with NSF grants). Should I care about this?

A similar recent complaint: political theorists concerned about the decline of political theory as a sub-discipline in American poli sci departments. Probably nothing I want to study will ever qualify for an NSF grant, but surely this development hits closer to home and should worry me. But not really, or maybe not yet.

However, I did read Quentin Skinner's "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas" this week and spend hours constructing a defense against this hateful and unwarranted attack. Methodology in history is an important question. The state of political science is...not. The problem seems to be that, while I decided last spring to study political theory instead of history, I was never convinced that there was any important difference between the two, or that political theory was anything other than a flexible branch of history that had been miscategorized with political science by some kind of cosmic filing error. I realize much of contemporary political theory is unconcerned with history, but those concerns exist only on the periphery of my consciousness, where people who believe that "justice can only be a quality of institutions" live. I can read their books, but I can't imagine thinking their thoughts, or really thinking about anything political without thinking about history.

So this might be why I don't really care about the fate of political science as a discipline, or even political theory, although such apathy is biting the hand that feeds me.* It's fine as a placeholder for the amorphous blob of "approaches to studying politics"--the last thing I want to do is re-organize human knowledge before I even acquire any. If political science disappeared tomorrow, theorists would find other homes, and I would defect back to history. However, if history as a discipline came to an end, that would be truly apocalyptic.

*There is an alternative explanation, based on models of political participation, which would suggest that I, like nonvoters and other scourges of democracy, have not yet acquired sufficient socioeconomic academic resources, established a participatory social network, or been personally mobilized from above to care. B. Franky would say I have not developed the social and political wherewithal that is created by associating, and every mid-century public intellectual would say I am exhibiting symptoms of alienation. All possible, I suppose.