April 5, 2002

Putting the Substance Back in Political Science

By ROGERS M. SMITH

Thirty years ago, I took my first course in the discipline that I would come to see as my vocation -- in something like the sense that Max Weber discussed "politics as a vocation" and "science as a vocation" in two celebrated lectures. It is the peculiar character of my discipline that it seeks somehow to combine the vocations that he treated separately.

We political scientists try, as Weber did, to contribute both to the progress of the human sciences and to constructive political

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