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Abstract This article compares political science to another discipline, with which it has much in common. That discipline is architecture. The political-science-as-architecture analogy has a long history in political thought. It also has important implications for the ends, means, and uses of political science. It follows from the political-science-as-architecture analogy that political science is necessarily a heterogeneous and pluralistic discipline. It also follows that political scientists have a common purpose, which is to conceive of institutional structures that allow humans to live together in societies, just as the purpose of architecture is to conceive of physical structures in which humans can live together.

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

IN RECENT YEARS THE JOURNALS HAVE PUBLISHED AN INCREASING NUMBER OF ARTICLES WHICH PRESENT OR UTILIZE FORMAL MODELS OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR AND POLITICAL PROCESSES. AT PRESENT, HOWEVER,THIS RESEARCH PROBABLY REACHE ONLY A SMALL AUDIENCE.

From its very beginnings political science has been a complex discipline torn in conflicting directions. Consider Aristotle's Politics, the first book that looks like a contemporary political science monograph. In the book, Aristotle presented two opposing strands of argument that he managed with tolerable success to hold together. On the one hand, Aristotle treated the study of politics as a branch of practical knowledge, its aim being action (praxis), not theory. Political action is always contextual or circumstantial, the action of particular agents faced with a particular set of circumstances. Therefore, the student of politics needs to be concerned above all with learning the art of political judgment, with how to think and deliberate well under specific circumstances. Aristotle wrote the Politics for men situated in popular assemblies, courts of law, and councils of war. He presented politics as inseparable from rhetoric, the art of public persuasion. Aristotle believed that the perspective of the political theorist should not depart too far from that of the citizen or statesman.Yet, at the same time, Aristotle acknowledged that politics is a form of knowledge with its own distinctive subject matter and set of truth claims. Good student of Plato's that he was, Aristotle saw himself as turning the study of politics into a science (episteme) inasmuch as it constituted the search for a comprehensive or general explanation of some particular branch of knowledge.

If at one time we thought that the movement to science would yield unification of the discipline, it is now apparent that there are many roads to science. Still it is important for us to consider yet again what the appropriate goals are for our scientific enterprise. What works in theory building; induction and deduction; prediction and control; the search for useful principles to guide us - examining these questions, we can build a better science. Political science has come so far as a discipline that different schools and scholars have different interpretations of science in the study of pol