CURA/Pardee: The Spirit and/of Political Science

With Professor Jeremy Menchik, Pardee School What do political scientists talk about when they talk about the spirit? The term appears in the discipline’s leading journals more frequently than more intuitive terms associated with religion, yet is conceptually opaque. As a result, this article tackles three questions. First, how do scholars use the term “spirit”? Second, what work does the concept do for scholars? Third, what is the spirit of political science? The article answers these questions through a conceptual genealogy of the term “spirit” in the publications of classical, modern, and contemporary scholars, followed by a quantitative content analysis using a novel dataset from the leading political science journals from 1906-2015. For classical scholars, the concept of the spirit repurposed the Christian Holy Spirit to advance Enlightenment theories about human progress. For modern and contemporary scholars, the spirit was further scrubbed of Christian connotations and inscribed with organic commitments to freedom. This article thus demonstrates that when political scientists talk about spirit, they reveal a theoretical indebtedness to a transcendent and intangible force that animates, directs, and guides humans. The conclusion suggests the spirit of the discipline is a gradual striving toward local and national efforts at political salvation through ideological and institutional conversion to liberal democracy, while also identifying historical and contemporary countercurrents. *Reading the paper in advance is required. Email arleneb@bu.edu for your copy.