Political Science and Institution Building: Oxford in Comparative Perspective*

Students of comparative politics know quite a lot about institutions and how to build them. This chapter applies those lessons back upon the discipline itself. It explores what it takes to build a strong academic department, institutionally differentiated from other groupings internally and connected to the larger discipline externally. The chapter goes on to explore why that proves more difficult in some places than others, and in the case of the study of politics in Oxford most especially. Some of the difficulties stemmed from institutional factors, like the colleges and the curriculum. Some stemmed from cultural factors. Yet others can be traced to something peculiar about the study of politics, in Britain generally but in Oxford most especially, among them failure to get sufficient critical distance from one’s research subjects, and acquiescence in a lazy pluralism as a way of avoiding mutual engagement.