32 The Nature of Political Theory‘every regime tends to produce a political science consonant with itself’. Consequently,
there is not one political science, rather each form adapts to the tradition it studies.
Thus, for Lowi, the ‘consonance’ between the state and the discipline of political sci-
ence is a subject worthy of study in itself (see Theodore Lowi in Farr and Seidelman
(eds.) 1993: 383).
The ‘state focus’ was also closely tied to educational imperatives. To concentrate
on the state was not only to learn about the history of institutions, but wasalso, and
more importantly for some scholars, to be inculcated with national sentiment. This
was essentially embodied in the idea of civic education (civics), or citizen educa-
tion, and the various arcane celebrations and ceremonies of citizenship—a perennial
theme in many states during the twentieth century. Citizenship education was a way
of encouraging both civic awareness and consensual civic virtue.^9 Further, with the
massive growth of the state sector in the nineteenth and twentieth century, there was
a strong perception of the need for trained personnel to fulfil the growing require-
ments of the specialized public services and bureaucracies within states. In addition,
many of those who entered into the early stages of teaching and promulgation of
political studies in universities, were themselves often committed to the idea of state-
based reform. To train and teach the new recruits for state bureaucracies, to carry
out specialized research for governments and to be able to affect subtly the direc-
tion of governmental thinking, through institutional design, were seen as desirable
aims by many in the politics discipline. As John Gunnell comments, ‘This search
for a science of politics was never disjoined from the practical concerns of polit-
ical education and political reform’. Thus, through the establishment of politics in
universities, it was hoped that, through civic education and scientific expertise, the
discipline itself could ‘command the attention of government’ (see Gunnell in Monroe
(ed.) 1997: 49). It was in this context that Theodore Lowi viewed the setting up of
the American Political Science Association, in 1903, as simply part of a ‘progress-
ive reform movement’ in American politics (see Lowi in Farr and Seidelman (eds.)
1993: 384).
In many ways, this practical reform strategy was born from the initial contact of
North American and some British intellectuals with German and French universities.
There was a perception of a close and productive relation, in these latter countries,
between the state and academic elites. In France, this was manifest in theGrand École
tradition, and, in terms of the discipline of politics, in the originalÉcole Libre des
Sciences Politiques de France.^10 The same idea developed in Britain, in the early 1900s,
particularly through the work of the Fabian Sidney Webb, amongst others, in setting
up the London School of Economics and Political Science, which was also initially
committed to ideas of educating future public servants and administrators, providing
skilled specialized social scientific research and permeating governmental thinking
with social science. What the American and British reformers failed to take into
account were the subtle but definite differences between British and American state
traditions and those of mainland Europe. In Britain and America, particularly, there
was often an underlying deep-rooted estrangement of universities and intellectuals
from the realm of the state.