Statist political science and American Marxism: A historical encounter

This article reexamines the disciplinary origins of American political science. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the field was engaged in a project of ideological state-building, relying on the concept of the state to put forward a particular normative vision of the American polity. This professional language of governance was developed partially in response to the democratic pressures of the period and to the growing prominence of socialist ideas, which were excluded from the framework of systematic political knowledge. Drawing upon the example of Daniel De Leon, a political scientist turned Marxist theorist, this article contrasts the disciplinary and radical socialist views of the state developed at the time. It suggests that these coexisting perspectives articulated competing notions of political agency, rights, and citizenship. Bridging the history of American political science with that of Marxism in the United States highlights the contested character of disciplinary knowledge, and the relationship between the concept of the state and its legacy in American political development.