Razvoj i stanje političke znanosti u Hrvatskoj: kontinuitet i diskontinuiteti
The Development and Position of Political Science in Croatia: Continuity and Discontinuities

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the history and contemporary position of political science in Croatia from the perspective of the relationship and influence between external factors and internal actors. The first part analyses the combination of external factors (in the first place, the nature of the political-ideological system and its changes) and internal actors (particularly the two leading groupings at the Faculty of Political Science – the philosophers and jurists, as bearers of opposite approaches and conceptions), which determined the formative period of the development of political science. The second part of the paper examines two discontinuities in the development of political science (the first one emerged with the breakdown of the reformist movement in 1971/72, by which the formative period terminated and the period of reideologisation and marginalisation of the discipline and studies began, and the second one emerged with the collapse of socialism and the Yugoslav state in 1991/92, and with it the period of Marxist political science terminated and the development of political science as an autonomous discipline in a pluralist environment began), and shows a certain continuity which manifested itself in a permanent, if ununiform, process of increasing the independence of political science as an academic discipline and of its methodological modernisation, as well as in the gradual prevalence of positivism. The third part points to the emergence of a political science ideology (“politologism”) as a feature of the contemporary position of political science, and to some related tendencies (the marginalisation of political theory, tendency toward exclusivism and closure).

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