ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between positivism and public intellectualism in the American disciplinary context. This disciplinary desire for relevance and engagement is often treated as so obvious and natural that it hardly needs justification. To most disciplinary observers, the blame goes to positivism as the preferred epistemology of the American political science discipline and, by extension, its international relations (IR) subfield. American IR graduate students are heavily schooled in this epistemological position, which assumes there is an objective social world that can be observed and measured utilizing procedures and techniques drawn largely from the natural sciences. The chapter concludes the unfortunate positivism and relevance must be that, given the historical relationship between the discipline and its social milieu, "speaking truth to power" is the surest path to irrelevancy. The exercise of critical self-reflexivity seems to demand self-imposed professional marginalization in the American context.
