But I can’t quote a source for that right now. Maybe it was mentioned briefly in a special edition of some journal.

By the way: Is it terribly low-brow to name Galbraith’s TV series The Age of Uncertainty as an inspiration to study social science? :-)

Thanks for the information and for the kind words. I wish that I could say that blogging was part of a plan to reach outside the academy to other conversations, but really I never expected CT to assume the role that it’s had. Not that it’s an enormous blog by some standards, but still, we have many more people reading us than I ever expected.

Jacob – you do know that there was supposed to be a sequel to Sartori’s book? The story goes that the mss was left in his car and stolen – he’s been saying ever since that he will recreate it at some point or another (and who knows – he may have; haven’t followed the literature on political parties in the last year or two).

But how do you get from Political History to Political Science? Radio is one part of the answer (long story), careerism another (exactly how I got stuck in Academia is an even longer story).

The question about the discrepancies between what draws us to a subject and the academic mainstream is interesting and important.

As a university teacher, I have to note that many of our students have problems with articles in scolary journals etc. The problem is their (lack of) grasp of quantitative methods.

In a recent review of undergraduate and graduate education in Political Science in Sweden, the review committee complained that courses put too much emphasis in normative theory (such as citizenship theory) and too little on rational choice theory and generally criticised a lack of training in methods in undergraduate courses. (Ok, I could write a long post on that subject. I do think that the review committee did have some points, here).

Oh, and in the field of Political Science, I’m still crazy about Giovanni Sartori’s “Parties and Party Systems” but that’s hardly the kind of book you would read as a teenager.

I’m serious about the kidney.

All of these provide the “heroic” model of the profession – the noble, totally independent discover of the truth. The reality is, of course, highly different: very narrow strategies and goals usually preset by upper management or investors, mind-numbing all-day meetings, repeated travel to Lansing or Lexington or Rochester (or Turlock, California for me), investing in one stock over another because one of them is maybe 2% better than the other, and so on.

Pretty much every scholarly book I ever liked had been marginalized by the time I read it. Thus, no academic career at all.

My theory is that a cold wind swept through the humanities starting about 1950, and that the present landscape has been irrevocably diminished. Mirowski and McCumber have given partial descriptions of these events from the woints of view of econ and phil.

It’s superficial I suppose and innacurate—I haven’t re-read it since. But it gave me a very good idea of the issues and the shape of the field, at least historically and was a jolly good read.

The thing about philosophy that makes it like humanities disciplines and unlike the sciences is that you can get in at the shallow end where it’s all fun and games and only have to deal with the hard, technical stuff once you’re hooked.

I should say at the outset that there are some external reasons for why I’ve been able to do what I’ve done. First, I had a topic—fear—that people got quite interested in after 9/11. I remember in grad school proposing this topic for my dissertation and lots of folks were quite discouraging. That was back in the early to mid 90s, when no one was talking about this. But post-9/11, things changed. Second, I had an academic publisher—and editor—that was quite adept at marketing scholarly books to a mass audience. Third, since I write a lot for newspapers and magazines, I had a lot of contacts with media people, so that helped in getting the book reviewed and marketed. And finally I teach at a university—CUNY —that isn’t too caught up in how many times you publish in the APSR or Political Theory. So all that has helped and freed me up to do what I wanted to do.

Having said that, I think one of the hardest challenges younger scholars like us face comes from the nay-saying among ourselves. I can’t tell you how many times friends and colleagues in my cohort have warned me to keep my head down, observe academic protocols, be careful, etc. I remember one conversation in particular with a young political theorist who’s at a top 10 poli sci department. He warned me against doing the work I’m doing and said I should wait till tenure. I said I didn’t have the stomach or the stamina to wait that long. I pointed to other political theorists in the field who’ve gotten kudos, from an early point in their careers, for doing more engaged writing. Michael Walzer comes immediately to mind. My friend said in response that even Walzer gets occasionally dissed by other political theorists for not consistently doing serious work! I remember thinking that if Michael Walzer was not a sufficiently inspiring model for younger theorists, nothing short of tenure at Harvard would convince them that they could do what they wanted to do and still be successful. I just never had that kind of time to waste—that is, if I had to wait till tenure at Harvard to write what I wanted to write, well, the whole thing didn’t seem really worth it to me.

And that’s the problem with being so careful and strategic: you hide what you want to say in order, first, to get a job, then tenure, then a better job at a better university, then Harvard. Beyond the obvious fact that very few people will ever get that far, the problem with this kind of thinking is that professional success is an ever elusive goal. So long as you ignore what it is that you really want to do, the external marks of success will never be really good enough for you. You’ll always want something more, and never do what you really want to do.

I bring this up because I think we really do psych ourselves out a lot of the time. As I said, I recognize that I’ve been lucky and had external things going for me. But pretty early on I resolved to write what I wanted to write, how I wanted to write it. I had my own models in mind—Arendt and Hartz, as I mentioned in my earlier post, among them—and I just ignored what most people said.

Grad students and younger faculty in particular are all too vulnerable to what passes for wisdom from our elders. I remember in grad school one professor in particular constantly telling grad students what they should write about—all of it based on what the market would bear. Beyond terrorizing students into writing what they didn’t want to write about, the silly thing about this kind of advice was that it was so present-minded in the stupidest way. What seems hot and faddish in one year, when you’re writing a proposal, will probably earn you nothing but a yawn by the time you finish the dissertation and will probably not get you a contract by the time you’re ready to publish your first book.

So without ignoring the real constraints we face as younger scholars—pressure for tenure, getting a job, and the like—I think the best advice I can give is to write what you care about, and to write it without paying too much attention to scholarly conventions and jargon. And whatever you do: don’t listen to the nay-sayers among your cohort. Everyone at this stage is just afraid, and in the guise of well meaning advice, they just make you afraid. The end result is you plummeting down the rabbit hole.

I should say, Henry, that you yourself are also a model for doing things differently. This blog is fantastic, and from what I can tell, it has in no way detracted from your scholarly work. So perhaps I don’t need to say all that I’ve said here; you seem to have figured it out yourself.

More generally, I’d say there’s a bait and switch at the heart of most science—I loved the physics I learned in classes. But you get to grad school and you’re stuck in a lab 12 hours a day for months in order to produce 1 paper that will probably never even make a class, and if it did would result in about 5 seconds worth of material.

The ratio of effort to knowledge gained is wildly different between taking classes and actually doing research. Classes are concentrated learning in which, in one semester, you cover generations worth of knowledge gained. Whereas in labwork, it’s mostly drudgery with a miniscule amount of knowledge the result. You’re one of the dozens of folks toiling for generations in order to produce enough material for one class.

Which is why I bailed on research as soon as I finished grad school. I loved the material and loved learning it. But that has almost nothing to do with being a scientist.

did these books (or whatever) give the right or wrong idea about the field that readers entered?

The right idea of the field at its best. I’m glad I first encountered the Platonic forms.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a clue about research, but it worked out okay(sort of).