John will have more to say soon on Dan Drezner’s suggestion that being mentioned in the New York Times is bad for your career as a political scientist. But in the interim, I thought that this snippet from Lawrence Jacob and Joe Soss’s recent _Annual Review_ “piece”:http://www.annualreviews.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.polisci.041608.140134 (gated) on the political economy inequality was worth mentioning.
bq. Indeed, in his 1982 APSA presidential address, Charles Lindblom used his moment in the spotlight to assail the “seriously defective” approach of conventional scholarship on American politics. … He urged scholars of U.S. politics to take more seriously the task of questioning the “relation between polity and economy” and analyzing “the state or government as . . . an institutional form of struggle between advantaged and disadvantaged” … Rather than embracing Lindblom’s charge and building on the field’s earlier tradition of engagement with political economy, Almond (1988, pp. 829, 840) and others effectively discouraged this kind of research by ridiculing major works as part of the “soft left” and warning colleagues against politicized “antiprofessionalism.” Beyond the profession, Lindblom’s efforts to renew the scrutiny of business influence were even criticized on the _New York Times_ op-ed page, in an advertisement paid for by Exxon Mobil Corporation.
It’s hard to imagine any political scientist today, whether left wing, right wing or centrist, being taken seriously enough to warrant an attack ad in the _New York Times._ Those were the days …