The thesis deals with a formative period in the history of political science from the 1850s to 1903. It treats political science as a university discipline, a scholarly practice emergent on the institutional-intellectual nexus between a modern American research university and transatlantic political knowledge. It thus aims to reconstruct how the nineteenth-century collegiate political learning, or moral philosophy, became the twentieth-century university political discipline, or political science. Hence, this thesis studies the transformations of instituted knowledge or the conversions of institutional-intellectual nexuses while paying particular attention to the mechanisms that furnished such conversions. The study opens with the exploration of political knowledge as incorporated in the mid-nineteenth century American academic dogmatism. Inquiring into moral philosophy’s administrative, pedagogical, and curricular functioning, I reestablish ephemeral threads that united the inner logic of political knowledge with collegiate institutional design. The first institutional-intellectual nexus is thus authenticated; it is political knowledge as didactical and hierarchical, ahistorical and indoctrinating. Further, the study inquires into the degeneration of political moralism and uncovers two sources of change: the lure of advanced learning on the “institutional” side and the emancipatory power of historicization on the “intellectual” side. The central part of the thesis is dedicated to the German-American academic transfer, which is considered a principal mechanism that facilitated the conversion of one nexus into another. I determine why the American imagination allocated the sources of change in the figment of a German university, how this figment was created, and what function it performed. Transitioning into the late 1880s, the last part of the thesis inquires into the nature of the historical science of politics as established in the modern research university. It aims to uncover ties that united novel political knowledge with advanced research techniques and the infrastructure of graduate instruction embraced by the generation of academic reformers. The second institutional-intellectual nexus is thus authenticated; it is political knowledge as empirical and historical, evolutionary and professional.