Abstract

The emergence of contemporary political science as a rigorously analytical and empirically based discipline is most commonly dated back to its remaking in the United States after World War II. This article highlights and explores the role of various com­ponents of rhetorical strategies deployed in the articulation and presentation of this new political science. In addition reshaping the terminological apparatus with which the ‘revolutionaries’ presented their own endeavours and those of their ‘traditionalist’ pre­decessors, the case for reforming the discipline was further boosted by the formulation of fantasies of interdisciplinarity as a shortcut to an unprecedented empowering of social knowledge, as well as by utterances of ambitions of the future social role of this new type of science – all three as discursive strategies in their own right.

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