Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that changing scientific ideas about racial difference were central to the academic study of politics as it emerged in the United States. From the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, scholars of politics defined and continually reoriented their field in response to the political imperatives of the racial order at home and abroad as well to as the vagaries of race science. The Gilded Age scholars who founded the first university departments and journals located sovereignty and legitimacy in a "Teutonic germ" of liberty planted in the new world by Anglo-Saxon settlers and almost extinguished in the conflict over slavery. Within a generation, "Teutonism" would come to seem like philosophical speculation, but well into the twentieth century, major political scientists understood racial difference to be a fundamental shaper of political life. They wove popular and scientific ideas about race into their accounts of political belonging, of progress and change, of proper hierarchy, and of democracy and its warrants. And they attended closely to new developments in race science, viewing them as central to their own core questions. In doing so, they constructed models of human difference and political life that still exert a powerful hold on our political imagination today, in and outside of the academy. By tracing this history, Jessica Blatt effects a bold reinterpretation of the origins of U.S. political science, one that embeds that history in larger processes of the coproduction of racial ideas, racial oppression, and political knowledge. Race and the Making of American Political Science illuminates key elements in the past of American political science--the founding of the discipline around a core racialist scheme and the subsequent evolution of ideas about race within the discipline as practitioners adapted to the rise of U.S. power in the world.--Howard Brick, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Blatt has provided a service to intellectual historians. This well-documented and clearly written book achieves its objectives by squarely positioning racist assumptions at the heart of political science's origins in the modern academy.-- The Journal of American History In an exhilarating story, which never flags in energy or excitement, Jessica Blatt shows how foundational racism and concepts of race were to American political science, not just at the beginning but in its heyday as a social science. A pioneering work exploding with insights and discoveries on every page, her book is also a cautionary tale for today, when academics and journalists increasingly turn to race as a category of political explanation, unwittingly repeating the maneuvers that Blatt so vividly documents and describes.--Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center Jessica Blatt has delivered a masterful account of the illiberal fiber inherent in American political reality. That is, how a country committed to democratic equality and freedom has invested so much ink, blood, and money in ideas of racial difference to produce a conjoined history of unfreedoms and massive inequalities. She brings history to life on the page in her compelling telling of the ways that key intellectuals shaped the early field of political science through varied but sustained commitments to normalized white supremacy. Blatt has opened the way for a watershed reflective moment in her field--and beyond.--Duana Fullwiley, Stanford University Jessica Blatt has written a fine book. She is correct that race is a dimension of disciplinary history that has not been seriously explored. Everyone notices the founding generation's Teutonism, but none of the major historical studies have taken it seriously as a species of racialism or examined its lingering consequences.--Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University Jessica Blatt's groundbreaking book explores the leading thinkers who shaped the foundation of the political science discipline . . . [T]his book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the merger between science and politics. It makes a convincing argument that racialism and its various manifestations (White supremacy, colonialism/neocolonialism, imperialism, evolution, and racial psychometrics) have been instrumental to shaping political science.-- History of Education Quarterly Jessica Blatt is Associate Professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College. Introduction Chapter 1. "The White Man's Mission": John W. Burgess and the Columbia School of Political Science Chapter 2. "All Things Lawful Are Not Expedient": The American Political Science Association Considers Jim Crow Chapter 3. Twentieth-Century Problems: Administering an American Empire Chapter 4. The Journal of Race Development : Evolution and Uplift Chapter 5. Laying Specters to Rest: Political Science Encounters the Boasian Critique of Racial Anthropology Chapter 6. Finding New Premises: Race