ABSTRACT
When American political science emerged as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, it was institutionally and intellectually bound with the study of history. A reflexive political science is a science that takes into account the historical position of its own scholarship. The conception of democracy implicit in the Polity coding rules and, by extension, in democratic peace research reflects the procedural vision of democracy that triumphed during the cold war. In the case of the democratic peace, a proposition that the discipline's mainstream views as a timeless empirical law is shown by reflexive analysis to be but a timebound thesis rooted in particular historical and political circumstances peculiar to the late twentieth-century United States. To the empirical mainstream of political and social science, of course, such subjectivity is intolerable. A reflexive examination of empiricist political science reveals it to be as subjective and value-laden as the interpretive approaches it rejects, if not as honest about its character.
