Political science and conservative ideas: The American case

Leading political science journals publish few articles about the ideas that animate modern American conservatives. Perhaps this is because the subject cannot be investigated as rigorously as we would like. There are too many conservatives publishing too many books and articles for anyone to know for sure exactly which-the authors or the books-are crucial to the subject; conservative concerns sometimes vary along with electoral imperatives; people on the right tend to 'prove' their case by telling anecdotes rather than offering solid data; they often reason via correlations that sound persuasive but do not actually demonstrate causation. Consequently, the ideas of modern conservatism cannot be analyzed like political theorists analyze their 'canon' via writing, usually in philosophical terms, about a relatively few works here and there by people such as Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Burke, J. S. Mill, Marx, Rawls, Habermas, Arendt, and Walzer. Nevertheless, the subject is vital to modern politics. For example, President George W. Bush used conservative ideas, among others, to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And where that is the case, we should approach conservatism via the techniques of intellectual history, doing the best we can on the methodological side but illuminating our findings with terms and concepts that convey special insights available to political science as a scholarly discipline.