Why Political Scientists Aren't Public Intellectuals
Science Forget about Politics?" the journalist Jonathan Cohn (1999) lamented the disappearance of a certain kind of academic-typified by the Harvard professors James Q. Wilson, Samuel Huntington and Stanley Hoffmannfrom contemporary political science departments. Wilson "was more than just a scholar," Cohn wrote, "he was a public intellectual" whose "byline was as apt to appear on some policy-related article in the New York Times (or The New Republic) as it was on a peer-reviewed paper in the American Political Science Review." Huntington, "arguably his generation's most influential student of international relations," helped to start a popularly read foreign-policy journal. And Hoffmann, whose scholarship spanned "political theory, comparative government and international relations," still found "time to write regularly for the New York Review of Books." While Wilson, Huntington, and Hoffmann of course continue to be