Masters of Political Science

For a while now, political science as a discipline has been big enough (in terms of the number of academics) and analytically mature enough to justify reflections on and reviews of its achievements. In fact, there is no lack of general handbooks, dictionaries and 'state of the art' assessments (as well as 'reflective' journals such as the ECPR's own European Political Science), which are useful in helping us to understand and evaluate where we currently are and where we might still need to go. The focus of these texts, however, is on particular concepts, themes, research areas, institutions or behaviour. What they rarely do is indulge in a critical reflection on the political scientists themselves, especially those who are commonly accepted as having made the most significant contributions to the growth of their discipline. This book fills an important gap in the growing reflective literature on the political science discipline: it consists of a series of 'objective' profiles of the 'Masters of Political Science', written by political scientists who have read and studied their work and who are therefore in a position to evaluate the nature of their contributions. The eleven political scientists whose contributions are presented and analysed in this volume offer an overall vision of what contemporary political science has been and is today. The great thinkers whose analyses and contributions are discussed have been chosen to represent the discipline as a whole, with its various themes and its variations through geographical location, national schools and perspectives. In addition, the selection is designed to represent both American scholars and different European nations. The Masters: Robert Dahl, Anthony Downs, David Easton, S. E. Finer, Samuel P. Huntington, Juan J. Linz, Seymour Martin Lipset, Giovanni Sartori, Sidney Verba, Aaron Wildavsky, Hans Morgenthau Masters of Political Science was originally published in Italian by il Mulino Publishing House.