Francis Lieber and the Interpretation of American Political Science

Abstract

This essay hopes to contribute to the revival of interest in the history of American political science. In particular, it focusses on the hermeneutical conception of political science as found in the nearly-forgotten work of Francis Lieber, especially in his Legal and Political Hermeneutics of 1837. The Hermeneutics traced out a set of elementary principles and regulative rules for the interpretation and construction of words, acts, and texts. The previous debates on the meaning and scope of "political science" and the Constitutional turmoil in and around 1837 help establish the context. This essay also reconstructs the linguistic foundations of Lieber's hermeneutics, as well as the republican political commitments which made his science of politics a science for politics. Recovering this textual episode in our discipline's past may yet be put to historiographical and methodological use.