On the shoulders of giants: restoring the normative afflatus of political science

There is no doubt that political science has always been characterised by a normative afflatus. Verba was deeply concerned with understanding how democracy works in practice and how it can survive over the course of time. Lasswell constantly argued that political science should focus on problem-solving in order to improve the quality of citizens’ lives. David Easton clearly indicated that political science ought to focus on major problems that must be immediately addressed. For Sartori, political science should be conducted for society’s sake and should produce useful and applicable knowledge; for Ostrom and Putnam, it should help citizens; and for Katznelson, it should focus on how to pursue “a more decent politics and society under dangerous and difficult conditions”. For many reasons internal and external to the discipline, these normative roots and goals have been forgotten in recent decades. It is time to restore the normative afflatus of political science by pushing it to become more normative-based, more solution-seeking, more engaged and more critical.