ABSTRACT
The methodological regimentation of contemporary political science has its thickest roots in the soil of the 1920s science of politics movement. At the forefront of this movement was Charles Merriam, who had inherited the mantle of leadership from Graham Wallas and Arthur Bentley, fore runners of the movement at the turn of the century. Contemporary rational choice methods and theories are now dominant in the social sciences, the heir to behavioralism has become the preeminent trend in political science. The crisis he witnessed within the discipline was thus a microcosm of the ideological instability and insecurity he perceived in the American and international political landscapes writ large. The attempt to bring political studies to the status of a science remained an uphill battle where the "metaphysician dislikes its empiricism, the natural scientist suspects its human uncertainty, the historian abhors its attempt to theorise".
