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1. So here we go with another wheeze on the "political science has lost all its relevance" harmonium chronicle.com/article/How-Po… . Last week it was history's turn - . This week, it's political science "scholars increasingly privilege rigor over relevance."
2. Desch's argument is well rehearsed, not only in his own previous articles, but in multiple versions of the same argument by others over the last couple of decades. The rhetoric varies slightly from piece to piece, but the bill of goods doesn't.
3. First that there was a halcyon Age of Gold, when Foggy Bottom was a hop and a skip from Harvard Yard. Giants like Kissinger and Huntington strode the earth in those days, and on their shoulders perched myriads of lesser scholars, all with policy recommendations
4. who, if they did not exactly speak truth to power, could certainly tell things to power that power found useful. Now, we subsist in an Age of Bronze or Iron, where mere sophists, economists and calculators hold sway, prizing irrelevant mathematical sophistication
5. over providing government with the grand visions that it needed. Desch claims that one key reason why social science has become so abstruse is " disciplinary self-interest" - the desire to separate social science from the laity through a bullshit-baffles-brains strategy.
6. Some observations, in no particular order. First, that there may indeed be some "disciplinary self interest" at stake here - but that is plausibly at least as true of Desch and other critics as of the discipline they are seeking to criticize. It is notable that Desch's
7. critique, as with the similar critiques of Mearsheimer and others, is intensely focused on national security. This whole fight is an external front of an internal disciplinary war, between those who see policy relevance as the coin of the realm, and those who prefer
8. quantitative testing. At stake are tenure lines, control of departments, disciplinary prestige and a wide variety of other resources. Who chooses the terrain of the battlefield has a notable advantage in winning the battle. Second, that the definition of "relevance" is
9. accordingly a quite narrow one. "Relevance" stands in as a shorthand for "usefulness to US policy makers," and in particular elite foreign policy decision makers. That is not an indefensible definition of relevance, but it is a loaded one. Many kinds of work can be relevant
10. that are not aimed at US foreign policy elites. Take for example Keck and Sikkink's extraordinarily valuable "Activists Beyond Borders" - which may help US foreign policy decision makers, but is more directly aimed at helping activists.
11. Third, Desch mischaracterizes the work of Frieden and Lake as equating "science" with pure research, or knowledge for its own sake." This is simply untrue. Lake argues, for example that the reason we need scientific rigor is because international relations are so important"
12. that we cannot afford to get it wrong in a world where “the human condition is precarious.” Frieden and Lake, moreover, discuss how the kind of political economy that they contribute to has had an extraordinary impact on policy makers, building the current consensus on trade. 
13. One can take issue with many aspects of their ideas if one wants, but they are not doing science for science's sake - they have a serious and quite explicit set of arguments about how science ought be publicly useful.
14. Finally, as co-chairs of last year's APSA convention, @AnnaGBusse and I both set out to pull political science findings together with broader public debate, as the major contribution of the conference. We found no resistance whatsoever to such engagement; quite the contrary.
15. The same is true of the Monkey Cage, where we have now published pieces by literally _thousands_ of political scientists over the last several years, aimed at a broad public audience. Thousands. This is not a small subsection of the discipline.
16. So I think that Desch's analysis is flawed. It turns the unhappiness of a particular sub-disciplinary faction into a general condemnation of the discipline. It mistakenly treats policy maker interest as a proxy for relevance more generally. And it ignores or erroneously
17. discounts a vast congeries of facts that are inconvenient for its bill of charges. NB that this is an extract from a book - it is entirely possible that the book deals with some of these questions better (by definition, CHE polemics aren't great on subtle qualifications)
18. None of this is to say that political science is anywhere close to where it ought be. Desch says that one problem of political science is that it focuses on objectivity to the exclusion of relevance. I think differently - the problem is that it treats as objective what are in
19. fact value judgments. Thus, the 'open economy politics' approach that Frieden and Lake are associated with has strong normative foundations in presumption that greater openness is in everyone's interests. If more OEP people acknowledged this, it would make for better argument
20. I don't believe that we will ever get back to Desch's Age of Gold, nor should we want to. It foundered less because of quantification than because its social conditions - a particular, relatively unitary elite culture - broke down irrevocably.
21. I would like to see more attention to relevance measured not by the approval of policy makers, but useful engagement with, and production of knowledge for, broader publics (Jack Knight and I discuss this in a paper - henryfarrell.net/wp/wp-content/… - which I have pillaged for this
22. thread). Finally, and as a corollary of the previous, engagement with questions of democracy seems a far more pressing and important task for political scientists than coming up with new tweaks on traditional approaches to grand strategy.
23. Doubtless this reflects my own interests in the discipline, formal and informal intellectual alliances, and political commitments (to a left foreign policy). But there you go. Finis.
