We Have a Firm Foundation 31the manner in which subordinate agencies were subject to parliamentary scrutiny,
the long-standing tradition of common law, and the peculiarities of the unwritten
constitution, made legal and political theorists and historians less willing to speak
so self-consciously of the British state. Odd elusive terms like ‘crown’ were often
preferred. The canon of Whig historians, from Burke onwards, contributed towards
this more elusive perspective. The British experience was considered different, if not
unique. This was an idea that punctuated political studies in Britain well into the
twentieth century. However, substantialStaatslehretexts, such as Bluntschli’sTheory
of the State, were still translated into English during this period and obviously had
a receptive audience.
Why was the state focus so central to political studies and political theory? The
answer to this is complex. There are both external and internal reasons. The external
reasons refer to the broader social, political, and historical context of political study.
First, there was a symbiosis between, on the one hand, the growth of states and
nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, on the other hand,
the concentration on the concept of the state within political studies. Thus, in his-
torical terms, for example, Italy was only unified as a state in 1861 and Germany in
- The United States was itself searching for a secure sense of identity and unity
throughout the nineteenth century, especially after the enormous upheaval of the
civil war in the 1860s. Overall, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries encompassed
aperiodofacceleratedstate-making, the enthusiastic formation and promulgation
of nationalisms often through developing public education systems, and the wide-
spread creation and application of state constitutions. The language of the nation
state was also embodied in calls for sovereignty and self-determination—a call which
increased throughout the twentieth century, especially in the period of post-1945
decolonization. The fact that the discipline of politics grew within the universities
of most modern states during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that
the primary focus of the initial political studies was the concept of the state is not
therefore fortuitous. In fact, within current international relations the state isstill
largely the central academic focus.
Some scholars have also argued that political studies, as they developed in the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were remarkable for being so closely linked to the
character of their own nation state traditions (see Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk
(eds.) 2001). Certainly this would be true of Britain, France, and Germany. This
linkage was made explicit by Lieber in America, as early as 1858, when arguing for
the need for political science in North American universities. He remarked to his
American audience that ‘we stand in need of a national university, the highest appar-
atus of the highest modern civilization. We stand in need of it, not only that we may
appear clear with equal dignity among our sister nations...but on grounds peculiar
to ourselves’ (Lieber in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) 1993: 21). The same point was
also noted by later twentieth century commentators on North American political
studies. Thus, in the Presidential address to the American Political Science Associ-
ation in 1991, Theodore Lowi noted that ‘American political science is itself a political
phenomenon and, as such, is a product of the American state’. Lowi continued,