The Case for Disciplinary History: Political Studies in the 1950s and 1960s 1

This article proposes a greater emphasis upon the intellectual history of political studies in the UK. The limitations of conventional understandings of the disciplinary past are considered in relation to the 1950s and 1960s. The author seeks to challenge contemporary views of this period in two respects. First, he shows how the key institutions of the emergent discipline were formed for highly contingent reasons, and how they were underpinned by a disciplinary ethos that was inherited from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Second, he draws attention to an important, and neglected, shift in disciplinary self-understanding in the late 1950s and 1960s, as figures like W. J. M. Mackenzie blended aspects of the dominant approach to political inquiry with newer ideas, thus generating an influential conception of a distinctively British political science.

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