Letters

To the Editor:

Almost despite ourselves, we appreciated and enjoyed reading Bruce Heiden’s well-crafted “The Ideology of Political Science” (Summer 2013, vol. 26, no. 2), a response to our own “Seeking Relevance: American Political Science and America” (Spring 2013, vol. 26, no. 1). Prof. Heiden’s strongly worded essay makes some sound points. Here, we offer five key disagreements with Bruce Heiden, who, though an accomplished scholar, has seemingly spent little time reading political science journals and attending political science conferences.

First, Heiden complains that we offer “no account of how and why political science developed,” and thus cannot understand how the field works today. Such a treatment was beyond the scope of our AQessay—though we do spend a bit of time on pages 404–6 outlining the field’s modern history—and one of us has done more extensive work in this