“Lawyer in the Social Sciences”—Geoffrey Sawer

A Problematic Discipline: The Identity of Australian Political Studies

“…His primary emphasis on political institutions and processes (sans political economy) re ects his own background in the law. This emphasis also suggests a certain eye to contemporaneous developments in American social science (see Cranston 1980). Indeed, in his report on his 1949-50 study tour, Sawer (1950b, 11) describes 'the Americans' as the leaders in social science research, indicating that he favoured 'the American tendency to accumulation and measurement of facts in the social sciences rather than the European and British tendency toward personal memoir, aesthetic appreciation of character and a priori historicism'.…”