As a political scientist for more than two decades, I have concluded that the discipline is badly flawed, not because of the all-too-cutesy claim that it is not truly scientific, but because it is largely built on a critical, foundational error: political scientists are too sanguine about the state.

Rightly understood, political science should be about social organization, particularly for governance. And there we should be in awe, as chemists are in awe of the spontaneous organization of chemicals, biologists in awe of the organizing power of natural selection, and economists (ideally, at least) in awe of the spontaneous organization stemming from human exchange.

But few political scientists are in awe of the human capacity for spontaneous organization for the purposes of governance. One of the notable few is Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, but while she is greatly admired across the discipline, she is rarely emulated. Instead, at the center of political science is, most often, the state — or at least its effective organ, government — an intentionally organized construction (even if, as Hayek suggested, it is over the long run more the product of human action than human design).