Abstract
American Political Science Association (APSA) presidential addresses were once christened “barometers of yearning and hope” by SUNY political scientist John Gunnell (1993: 268). He might as well have referred to them as benchmarks of critique and appeal.
At a moment in history when the accountability of democratic governments is literally bleeding away, when the hybridization of democratic regimes in Central-East Europe is on the rise and democracies in Western Europe and North America are compromised by the erosion of democratic rules and values, political science as a science of democracy becomes inevitably partisan. It should acknowledge such partisanship, explaining aims and implications.
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Notes
- 1.
Albert Otto Hirschman (1915–2012) should not only be remembered as an unconventional political economist, but also for contributing to the rescue of well over 2000 Jewish Germans and other refugees from being deported to Nazi concentration and extermination camps. He worked with Varian Fry (1907–1967), who during much of 1940/1941 headed the privately funded, US-initiated Emergency Rescue Committee (Centré Américain de Secours) in Marseilles. The committee provided a fig leaf for smuggling refugees across the Spanish border by clandestine escape routes or falsified documents. In shameful cooperation between the Vichy regime and the US State Department, Fry was eventually expelled. His achievements “were largely unrecognized in his own country”; his death at 59, following severe illnesses, “went almost unnoticed” (Hirschman 1992: VIII). Among those rescued by Fry and his small operation were Hannah Arendt, Alma Mahler, Anna Seghers, Heinrich Mann and his wife, Franz Werfel and his wife, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arthur Koestler and Siegfried Kracauer. Varian Fry was finally, in 1994, recognized as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem. A square in Marseilles and a street in the center of reunified Berlin have been named after him.
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More precisely: OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Limited Election Observation Mission.
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Eisfeld, R. (2019). Twenty-First-Century Political Science: Politicization of a Discipline?. In: Empowering Citizens, Engaging the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5928-6_12
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