Political Science, Political Theory, and the Liberal Arts

What does it mean to think about political science as a liberal arts discipline? This paper examines that question in relation to three sets of relationships: between the disciplinary practice(s) of studying politics (“political science,” broadly speaking) and the practice(s) of politics; between political science research or scholarship and the teaching of political science; and between political theory and the rest of political science (and more broadly the social sciences). The paper proposes that to conceive of political science as a liberal arts discipline is (at least in part) to have a special concern with the problem of the continuities both within and among each of these sets of relations.