Beschreibung

Rainer Eisfeld’s book highlights the merits of socio-historical research into topics infrequently covered by mainstream political science. Directing attention to the need for carefully scrutinizing the convenient “truths” of established – post-Nazi, post-Communist – political narratives, its chapters encourage reflection of the discipline’s history and state of the art.

A companion volume to the 2012 book entitled Radical Approaches to Political Science: Roads Less Traveled (also published by Barbara Budrich), this collection is likewise based on an approach to political science informed by a theory of participatory pluralism and grounded in history. The chapters focus on the discipline’s fragmentation and its retreat from public debate; on the varying roles of political science and international relations as champions of more or less democracy; on normative and analytical concepts developed by Hannah Arendt, Klaus von Beyme, and Robert A. Dahl; on the deconstruction of the “Peenemünde Legend” about the unspoiled rule of science at the Third Reich’s missile development center; on reasons for the Peenemünde engineers’ actual complicity in the exploitation of concentration camp labor to mass-produce their V-2 missile.

“Rainer Eisfeld’s leadership in the fields of pluralism and analysis of the discipline in the International Political Science Association means that he has quite a background to share with us in this, his most recent, collection of essays.”

John Trent

From the Contents:

What Political Science May (Not) Achieve

Specialization and Teamwork: Current Challenges to the Discipline

Political Science and Transition to Democracy: The German Experience

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

The „Three Pillars of Hell“: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Total Rule – Sources, Merits, Limits

Prospects of Pluralist Democracy in an Age of Economic Globalization and World-Wide

Migration: A Tribute to Robert A. Dahl

Klaus von Beyme: The Political Scientist as Global Scholar and Public Intellectual

Two Profoundly Different Schools of Political Science

Political Science in Great Britain and Germany: The Roles of LSE and DHfP

From the Berlin Political Studies Institute to Columbia and Yale: Ernst Jaeckh and Arnold Wolfers

Peenemünde: Challenging the Myth of Nonpolitical Technology

Peenemünde, the V-2 and the Exploitation of Slave Labor. A Study in Reactionary Modernism

The Peenemünde Legend: Origins, Perpetuation, Demise

Table of Contents (pdf)

Der Autor:

Rainer Eisfeld,
Professor emeritus of Political Science at Osnabrück University, Germany. Rainer Eisfeld has long served as a member of the Buchenwald/ Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial’s Board of Trustees and, in recent years, also of the International Political Science Association’s Executive Committee. He taught at UCLA as a Visiting Profess.

Download for free: publicity leaflet (pdf)

Target groups: Faculty, under- and postgraduates in political science and contemporary history

Keywords: disciplinary fragmentation, retreat from public debate, political philosophy, normative paradigms, reactionary modernism as an analytical tool

Subject area: Political Science

Zusätzliche Information

Autor*innen

Rainer Eisfeld

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Schlagwörter

Disciplinary fragmentation, Normative paradigms, Political philosophy, Reactionary, Retreat from public debate