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In Praise of Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Charles E. Lindblom
Charles E. Lindblom
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Is anyone's esteem for political science better suppressed than a political scientist's? Ordinary modesty is admirable, but his is professionally destructive. For, not only hiding his light under a bushel, he follows the more nihilistic course of blowing it out. Granted that many political scientists neither deprecate their discipline nor permit a low regard for it to stultify their work, I have been repeatedly assured by members of the profession that no social science is more retarded and none less promising for systematic theory. Thus they hide—even from their own eyes—their discipline's accomplishments. This I shall try to show, offering two books as evidence. There is other evidence, too. When even politically ignorant undergraduates complain that the major in political science is thin, no imaginable poverty of the field explains enough. Such a phenomenon proves concealment, either deliberate or unintended.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , January 1957 , pp. 240 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1957

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References

1 Herring's, PendletonPolitics of Democracy (New York, 1940)Google Scholar is an excellent example of a work with substantial theoretical content remaining implicit. Less rich in theory but more explicit in the theory it contains is Truman's, DavidThe Governmental Process (New York, 1951).Google Scholar Somewhat more systematically theoretical and more explicit is Schattschneider's, E. E.Party Government (New York, 1942).Google Scholar Still more deliberate attempts to make explicit and systematic the underlying theory of political science include, among others, Simon, Herbert A., Administrative Behavior, New York, 1947Google Scholar; Dahl, R. A., A Preface to Democratic Theory, Chicago, 1956Google Scholar; Easton, David, The Political System, New York, 1953Google Scholar; Lasswell, H. D. and Kaplan, A., Power and Society, New Haven, Conn., 1950Google Scholar; Latham, Earl, The Group Basis of Politics, Ithaca, N.Y., 1952Google Scholar; Dahl, R. A. and Lindblom, C. E., Politics, Economics and Welfare, New York, 1953Google Scholar; and Ranney, A. and Kendall, W., Democracy and the American Party System, New York, 1956.Google Scholar I would add the further evidence of underlying theory constituted by Bentley, A. F., The Process of Government, Chicago, 1908Google Scholar; and Edwards, W., “The Theory of Decision-making,” Psychological Bulletin, LI, NO. 4 (July 1954), pp. 380–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For example, Ranney, and Kendall, , op. cit., p. 85.Google Scholar

3 These propositions are taken verbatim from a summary list of twenty-five testable propositions, pp. 336–41.

4 For example, Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., and Gaudet, H., The People's Choice, New York, 1948Google Scholar; and Berelson, B., Lazarsfeld, P. F., and McPhee, W. N., Voting, Chicago, 1954.Google Scholar

5 For a fine discussion, still largely correct, of the discrepancy between the theory of the firm and the phenomena described by it, see Rothschild, K. W., “Price Theory and Oligopoly,” Economic Journal, LVII (September 1947), pp. 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in the American Economic Association's Readings in Price Theory, Chicago, 1952.Google Scholar