Celebrity and Politics

What Good Can Political Science Do?" begins by taking inventory of the state of the world and the discipline. The picture is not pretty. Dictatorship is on the march globally and public support for political science is declining, with the value neutral pursuit of knowledge under assault in a highly politicized and polarized national environment. The issue of whether the discipline produces anything useful has resurfaced as it does periodically. Questions arise as to whether we have become too specialized, abstract, and insular to contribute the kind of knowledge that is of use in our current political debates or in solving our many nagging problems. Smith calls for greater practical engagement of the discipline with worldly questions. We need to make our results more relevant to practical political questions and synthesize our knowledge so that it helps society focus on "big picture" questions. For instance, we must use what we know about identity formation to understand the resurgence of nationalism and the hardening of deep social divisions. He also calls for more civically engaged research to both strengthen our understanding of community and to contribute more directly to it. Finally, he urges the discipline to recommit to teaching as one of its central missions and to focus on ways to improve the transmission of knowledge and society's understanding of politics. He believes that in this way political science as a discipline can make a contribution to resolving malaise rather than becoming a casualty of the antipathy it generates.