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This paper argues that U.S. political science was significantly reoriented in the early twentieth century, becoming in important ways a science of politically relevant differences within populations. The post-civil war cohort that founded the formal institutions of discipline in the 1880s sought a basis for cohesion and democratic legitimacy in a vision of "the state," which they understood as a national and even racial soul. But competing visions soon emerged, including Woodrow Wilson's demystifiation of the state as a set of governing institutions, and Charles Beard's analysis of the class basis of U.S. democracy. Influential as these visions were, neither can claim a meaningful and continuous lineage in the discipline as it subsequently developed. More successful in this regard were Charles Merriam and his protégés in the so-called "Chicago School" of political science in the interwar years. I argue that they generated an alternative set of practices and a vision of the discipline that rendered the study of politically relevant difference rooted in individual psychological or even biological traits a central task. I show, moreover, that this vision and these practices are linked to political scientists' engagement with changing notions of group and racial difference then emerging from anthropology and psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]