Interdisciplinarity and Political Science1
| Author | Michael Moran |
| Date | 01 May 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.2006.00253.x |
| Published date | 01 May 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Interdisciplinarity and Political Science1
Michael Moran
University of Manchester
‘Interdisciplinarity’ is an ancient notion in the social sciences, but has acquired both pedagogic and
policy popularity in recent decades. Paradoxically, it only makes sense in a disciplinary world. The
disciplines have been greatly strengthened in recent decades, and interdisciplinarity can partly be
understood as a response by interests threatened by disciplinarity. It is also a strategy used by dis-
ciplines in crisis, and by dissidents from disciplinary hierarchies.
‘Interdisciplinarity’ is one of the great buzzwords in academia, and has been
for perhaps a generation. As long ago as the 1960s the creation of the new
‘Robbins’ universities was accompanied by common claims that they would shift
the balance of intellectual power from old disciplines to newly combined inter-
disciplinary enterprises.2The Economic and Social Research Council has long
organised its mission statements around the promotion of interdisciplinary
themes.3More recently still, the public ideology of the upcoming Research Assess-
ment Exercise (RAE) in the United Kingdom is accompanied by a rhetoric of
interdisciplinarity.4
My purpose here is to interrogate the concept, notably in the setting of the field
of political science. Although I will show that issues to do with the claims of inter-
disciplinarity raise big questions about the purpose of our wider university system,
the debates have a particular pertinence for political studies. The sources of this
special relevance are fairly obvious. Although the ‘subject’ has an ancient lineage,
the ‘discipline’ is comparatively new – a product, as a recent collection on its history
reminds us, largely of the twentieth century.5The rise of this disciplinary identity
has in turn raised fears, especially under our present system of research evalua-
tion, that the growth of disciplinary hierarchies will endanger intellectual plural-
ism – a fear that is a main theme of David Marsh and Heather Savigny’s recent
article in this journal.6
Interdisciplinarity, as I will shortly show, is flavour of the moment, uniting an
extraordinary range of figures – from the most hierarchically minded managers of
academic enterprises to the most idiosyncratically minded of intellects. Yet, inter-
disciplinarity is full of paradoxes and puzzles, and understanding these helps
explain the greatest puzzle of all: why, in a world where almost everyone speaks
approvingly of interdisciplinarity, disciplinary identities are if anything strength-
ening their hold over the academic mind. That, after all, is the lesson of the growth
of political science as a discipline in recent decades. What accounts for the appar-
ent paradox that interdisciplinarity is simultaneously hugely popular but unable to
make serious headway?
POLITICS: 2006 VOL 26(2), 73–83
© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
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