Charles Merriam is scarcely read today, and even among scholars
he is probably more often cited than read seriously. His ambiguous
position in the study of American democracy is unfortunate. Between
the two world wars, Merriman was the doyen of American political
science. This was a period when the most formative characteristics
of academic social sciences were taking shape, characteristics that
were to dominate the remainder of the century. During this period,
"science" and "progress" became virtually synonymous in the social
sciences. Between the two world wars, the liberal progressive
critique of America's founders, a critique that included scholars
such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, and others, became the
orthodoxy of a new political science. The heart of that critique,
insofar as it turned on methodological questions of how to study
American government, was very much the work of Charles Merriam.
Anyone who seeks to understand why that period was so pivotal in
the interpretation of American democracy must necessarily study
Charles Merriam and his influence. His work represents the first
comprehensive effort by a scholar in the liberal-progressive
tradition to survey the entirety of American political thought.
To read Merriam's political essays and writings is to read a
political theory that the behavioral tradition would come to label
as "normative." His essays included insightful interpretations of
Hobbes and Rousseau in European political philosophy as well as an
earlier work tracing American political thought from the founding
to the Civil War. This is a fundamental work for scholars working
in the liberal-progressive tradition.
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