Throughout the 20th century political scientists in the United States and Britain developed diverse positions on the nature, merits, and limitations of "historical" approaches to the study of politics. This conference will investigate the evolution of these approaches, bringing together the perspectives of intellectual historians, political theorists who write on the history of the discipline, and practitioners of political science. The conference seeks both to facilitate the understanding and evaluation of past and present work, and to draw lessons relevant for the study of politics in the 21st century.

The conference breaks the history of political science into four periods, with one session devoted to each. For each period one speaker will present on developments in the United States, one on developments in Britain, and one on similarities, differences, and interactions between the two. The conference will close with a roundtable discussion of Berkeley faculty interested in historically oriented approaches to political science. Panel members will reflect both on what contemporary practitioners have to learn from the conference's specific insights into the ebb and flow of various perspectives in political science, and what, in general, the role of reflections upon the disciplinary past can and should play in today's debates.

Please also visit the Political Science Department's webpage for this conference, which has copies of papers the conference participants will be presenting:
http://www.polisci.berkeley.edu/DeptNews/conference.html

Robert Adcock is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley. Robert specializes in political theory, with a research focus on the history, philosophy, and methodology of political inquiry. He has recently published co-authored articles (with David Collier) in the American Political Science Review and the Annual Review of Political Science. He is currently working on a dissertation exploring the impact of various German intellectual traditions on historical social science in the post-WWII US, with a particular focus on the works of the Barrington Moore, Jr. and Reinhard Bendix.

Chris Ansell is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley. His interests broadly include organization theory, comparative politics, and political sociology. Much of his work has focused on the explaining the historical genesis and development of institutions and organizations, with a special interest in European and American state-building and social movements. He has written on the development of the renaissance Florentine State (with John Padgett), on late 19th and early 20th century American urban political machines (with Arthur Burris) and trade unions (with Antoine Joseph). His first book - Schism and Solidarity in Social Movements: The Politics of Labor in the French Third Republic - was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2001.

Mark Bevir is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley. Mark’s research concentrates on political theory, social philosophy, and British studies. After receiving his D.Phil from the University of Oxford, Mark spent several years on the faculty of the University of Newcastle, UK, prior to moving to Berkeley. He is the author of The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999), as well as over sixty articles in academic journals or edited collections. His work has been the subject of a number of recent critical studies, including a special issue of History of European Ideas 28/2 (2002), and symposiums in Rethinking History 4/3 (2000), Philosophical Books 42/3 (2001), and History of the Human Sciences 15/2 (2002).

Henry Brady is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Director of UC DATA. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. His areas of interest include Quantitative Methodology, American and Canadian Politics, and Political Behavior. He is former president of the Political Methodology Group of the American Political Science Association. His current research interests include political participation in America, Estonia, and Russia, the dynamics of public opinion and political campaigns, the evaluation of social welfare programs, and the impact of computers on social policy making. Brady has co-authored two books. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) won the Harold Adams Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada in 1992-1993. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995) was featured in an American Political Science Review symposium in 1997. Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics.

Sandra den Otter is Associate Professor of History at Queen’s University. A graduate of Oxford, she has published The British Idealists (Oxford University Press, 1996), a study of late nineteenth century social theory. She is currently working on a study of how the experience of governing India shaped debate in mid 19th century Britain about the nature of the individual, community and society. Her interests include the intellectual, cultural, gender and imperial history of late 18th and 19th c Britain.

James Farr is Professor of Political Science and associate of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota. His principal research interests focus on the history and philosophy of social science with special attention to conceptual history, the history of political science as a discipline, and the discourse of a "science of politics" in European and American writers from Locke, Hume, and Marx to Lieber, Merriam, and Dewey.

John G. Gunnell is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the State University of New York at Albany. He specializes in political theory and the history and philosophy of social science. Recent publications include The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago, 1993); the Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); "The Archaeology of American Liberalism," Journal of Political Ideologies (2001) and "Is it Still the American Science of Politics? Handbooks and History," International Political Science Review (2002). He is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of democratic thought in American political science (Imaging and Imagining the American Polity) and working on the implications of Wittgenstein's philosophy for social science and democratic theory.

David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History at UC Berkeley. During the last five years his writings on history and politics have appeared in Constellations, Diacritics, Representations, Journal of American History, Academe, Public Historian, Aleph, Church History, Philosophical Studies, and Daedalus. His books include Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton,1996), and Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 2nd ed., expanded, 2000). He was plenary speaker for the political theory section of the American Political Science Association at its annual meeting of 2001.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (l973 and l996); Adorno, (l984); Marxism and Totality (l984); Permanent Exiles (l985); Fin-de-siecle Socialism (l980); Force Fields (l993); Downcast Eyes (l993) and Cultural Semantics (l998). He is finishing a book on the discourse of experience in modern European and American thought.

Dennis Kavanagh is Professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool. Before then he was professor at the University of Nottingham, Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, and has been a visiting professor at the universities of UC San Diego, Stanford and the European University. His most recent publications include The Re-ordering of British Politics (Oxford University Press 1998), The Powers Behind the Prime Minister (Harper Collins, 2000) and The British General Election of 2001 (Palgrave 2002), with David Butler.

Michael Kenny is a Reader in Politics at Sheffield University, England, where he has taught since 1993. Before that he was a Lecturer in Politics at the Queen's University, Belfast, 1990-3. His principal research interests are in the fields of modern British political thought and intellectual history. He has published studies on: the political ideas of the British New Left (1995); Anglophone literature on the history of political thought (with R.Eccleshall, 1995); normative theory and environmental policy (with J.Meadowcroft, 2000); and discourses of declinism in British political life (with R.English, 2000). He is the author of a number of papers, including studies of: social democratic thought and the politics of New Labour; the political ideas of Edward Thompson; and the uses/abuses of Antonio Gramsci in International Relations theory. He is currently completing a study of Identity Politics and Liberal Citizenship in Anglo-American Political Thought (with Polity Press, 2003), and a Reader in Political Ideologies (with Oxford University Press, 2003).

Rod Rhodes is Professor of Politics (Research) at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Professor Politics and Public Policy in the School of Politics and Public Policy, Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia) and Adjungeret Professor, Institut for Statskundskab, Københavns Universitet (Denmark). Between 1994 and 1999 he was Director of the Economic and Social Research Council's Whitehall Research Programme. He is the author or editor of 20 books including recently Understanding Governance (Open University Press, 1997); Control and Power in Central-Local Government Relations (Ashgate, 2^nd edition, 1999); and Transforming British Government Volume 1. Changing Institutions. Volume 2. Changing Roles and Relationships (Macmillan, 2000). He has been editor of Public Administration since 1986. He is chair of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

David Brian Robertson is Professor of Political Science and Fellow, Public Policy Research Center, University of Missouri-St. Louis. His teaching and research interests include public policy, political economy, American national politics and environmental issues. He is the author of Capital, Labor, and State: The Battle for American Labor Markets from the Civil War to the New Deal, The Development of American Public Policy: The Structure of Policy Restraint (with Dennis R. Judd), the editor of Loss of Confidence: Politics and Policy in the 1970s, and numerous articles and chapters on program design, political lesson-drawing, the new institutionalism and labor market policies in the United States and Great Britain. He currently is writing on the design of the Constitution and its legacy for American political development. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Policy History and he editor of CLIO, the newsletter of the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association. He received the Missouri Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2001, and serves as political analyst for KSDK Television (NBC-St. Louis).

Dorothy Ross teaches American intellectual history at Johns Hopkins University, where she is Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of history. She is the author of G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (University of Chicago Press, 1972); The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 1991); editor of Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and co-editor, with Theodore M. Porter, of The Modern Social Sciences, vol 7 in The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2002).

Eric Schickler is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997. Prior to that, he received his Bachelors Degree from New College of the University of South Florida in 1991. His first book, Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress, was published by Princeton University Press in 2001. His second book, Partisan Hearts and Minds (co-authored with Donald Green and Bradley Palmquist), will be published in August 2002 (Yale University Press). He is the author of several journal articles on congressional history and organization. He also has coauthored articles on party identification and on the relationship between new technologies and democratic theory. He teaches courses on the U.S. Congress, American political development, rational choice theory, and research methods.

Mark C. Smith is Associate Professor of American Studies and History, University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies from UT Austin in 1980. He has taught at the University of Wurzburg in Germany; the University of Texas at San Antonio; and Temple University’s Japan campus. His publications include Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Culture, 1918-1941; the entry "American Social Science" in The Oxford Companion to American History ed. Paul Boyer; "Witch-hunting during America's First war on Drugs: Richmond Pearson Hobson and ‘Narcotic Education’” in Fear Itself (ed. Nancy L. Schultz); and "Academics, Advocacy and the 1930s: A View from the 1930s" in Role of Advocacy in the Classroom (ed. Patricia Meyer Sparks).

Shannon Stimson is Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her areas of interest include Political Theory, Philosophy, and History of Ideas. Stimson currently serves on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review, has been recently appointed Chairman of the IGS Faculty Advisory Board and also serves as Co-Director of the Travers Program in Ethics and Governmental Accountability. She was elected the Christensen Fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford in 2000 and held a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Queens' College, Cambridge in 2001. She is the author of The American Revolution in the Law: Anglo-American Jurisprudence before John Marshall (Princeton University Press and Macmillan, Ltd., London, 1990), Ricardian Politics, (co-authored, Princeton University Press, 1991), and Writing a National Identity: Political, Economic and Cultural Perspectives on the Written Constitution (co-edited, Manchester University Press, 1993). Her current research considers the economic element in the development of political thought.

Margaret Weir is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at Berkeley. Weir has written widely on social policy and politics in the United States. She is the author of several books including, Schooling for All: Race, Class and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (coauthored with Ira Katznelson, Basic Books 1985); and Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1992). She has also edited several books that deal with development of social policy in the U.S. including, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (with Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, Princeton University Press 1988) and The Social Divide (Brookings and Russell Sage, 1998), which examines social policymaking during the Clinton administration. She is currently working on a study of metropolitan inequalities in the United States, with a particular focus on the politics of coalition-building in metropolitan America during the past decade.