Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

The discipline of political science is having an identity crisis. My first college degree (of five) was in political science, which I thought (erroneously) to be the best preparation for law school. I learned a lot in my political-science courses and had wonderful professors, but philosophy would have served me better, given my objectives. One reason there is a crisis in political science is that political science is a social science and there are different types of social science: naturalistic (which focuses on causal regularities), interpretative (which focuses on rules and meanings), and critical (which focuses on ideology, which it views as pervasive). The first, which models itself on natural science, takes an external perspective on political phenomena. The second takes an internal perspective. Both strive to be value free. The third is self-consciously evaluative.