These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Populism also pitted the people against the state. During populism’s first rise, the state as a political entity became an object of formal academic study through political science, one of a new breed of academic fields known as the social sciences. Before the Civil War, most American colleges were evangelical; college presidents were ministers, and every branch of scholarship was guided by religion. After 1859, and the Origin of Species, the rise of Darwinism contributed to the secularization of the university, as did the influence of the German educational model, in which universities were divided into disciplines and departments, each with a claim to secular, and especially scientific, expertise. These social sciences—political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology—used the methods of science, and especially of quantification, to study history, government, the economy, society, and culture.96 Columbia University opened a School of Political Science in 1880, the University of Michigan in 1881, Johns Hopkins in 1882. Woodrow Wilson completed a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins in 1886. He planned to write a “history of government in all the civilized States in the world,” to be called The Philosophy of Politics. In 1889, he published a preliminary study called, simply, The State.97 For Wilson’s generation of political scientists, the study of the state replaced the study of the people. The erection of the state became, in their view, the greatest achieve...