Professor Gerry Stoker of PAIR and C2G2 warns in an article just out in Political Quarterly of the importance of avoiding “the trap of ‘trained incapacity’”, repeating Bernard Crick’s warning that the increasing technological and methodological sophistication of political science would lead to disengagement from the practice of politics. Stoker offers a series of prescriptions in defence of politics: that political scientists should embrace relevance (while journalists and practitioners need to take its observations on board), that the disengagement of citizens with politics is a pressing problem in the twenty-first century, and that the ambition of political science should extend to the search for solutions.