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Pressure Group Theory: Its Methodological Range*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

R. E. Dowling
R. E. Dowling*
Affiliation:
University of Queensland and University of New South Wales
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Extract

An outstanding advance in one field of human endeavor will often inspire workers in others to try to transfer its conceptions or techniques into their own less successful fields, for obvious reasons. And so political theorists who have long been discontented with the state of politics when compared with that of certain other sciences have, in consequence, sought to advance their field by adopting the ideas or techniques of their scientific contemporaries. The impressive application of physics will probably increase both political tension and the political scientists' interest in methodology.

The last hundred years of political science have seen attempts at the introduction of various exotica, Darwinism, Economism, Freudianism, even Statisticism; but what I shall here discuss is the centuries-old attempt to appropriate the success of dynamics or mechanics to politics, an attempt which found its first great exponent in Hobbes but which has been carried on in this century by men like Bentley and Catlin. The success of dynamics, such men seem to have thought, is evidently the result of its method, which they took to be the reduction of phenomena to the primary qualities of matter and motion. We who are interested in politics, accordingly, will do well to copy the method of the successful scientists and reduce all political phenomena to similar primary entities. Just as Newtonian physicists speak of material bodies or particles, and the forces they exert upon each other, so we must confine ourselves to the description of the motions of atomic political bodies and the forces they exert upon each other. Thus we need only speak with Hobbes of men and their desires, or with Catlin of political men and their wills, or with Bentley of groups and their pressures, in order to succeed. We know that, in the early chapters of Leviathan, Hobbes announced this as his programme; but it is doubtful whether, as he moved from methodology to political theory, he did as he said he would do and whether he had not worked out his political theory before he “deduced” it from his primary entities of matter and motion. In what follows I shall try to show a similar history in the work of A. F. Bentley and D. B. Truman. I shall try to show that Bentley announced a methodological programme and that Truman's “development” of it has been quite external and could, in fact, have been undertaken without any reference to Bentley at all. I shall try to show, that is, that Bentley's contribution to political science has been of a psychological rather than a logical kind, and that the references made to him by contemporary pressure group theorists are similar to those which a Russian physicist might make to dialectical materialism.

Type
Bentley Revisited
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , December 1960 , pp. 944 - 954
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1960

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Footnotes

*

A paper delivered to a conference of the Australian Political Studies Association in Canberra, January 1960.

References

1 There is a sense of “dynamic” or “mechanistic” in which all sciences are, or aspire to be, mechanistic. But in this paper I have tried to confine my use of these two terms to the narrower (if vague) equivalent of “like Newtonian mechanics.”

2 Process of Government, reissue (Bloomington, Ind., 1949), p. 204. Unless otherwise indicated, further references to Bentley are to this book and to this edition of it.

3 P. 258. And compare his statement that “pressure … indicates the push and resistance between groups” with, say, Loney's, S. L. “Force is that which changes … the state of rest or uniform motion of a body.” Treatise on Elementary Dynamics, 7th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 55.Google Scholar

4 With Newton's Third Law compare Bentley's two remarks: “No interest group can be estimated at its right force except in terms of the amount of resistance that others will offer to it” (p. 410), and “If the machine hurts enough, the reaction on it will come just in proportion to relative strengths” (p. 418).

5 Catlin, G. E. G., in his Principles of Politics (Allen & Unwin, London, 1930), p. 78 ff.Google Scholar, uses exactly the same conception in the same way, but refers to it as “method.”

6 Cf. Catlin's “Not what they will, but that they will is the significant consideration,” op. cit., p. 139.

7 A very similar view is proposed by Watkins, J. W. N., in Philosophy of Science (1955), p. 58.Google Scholar The sort of reductionism I am discussing is not peculiar to the mechanistic approach to social science; as May Brodbeck has shown, it is common to those students of what she would call the “incomplete sciences” who attempt a short cut to completeness, or the formulation of a “stochastic equation” with a disturbance component of zero. Such attempts must fail since, as she says, “no individual social science can by itself expect to achieve completeness in its terms.” “Methodological Individualisms,” Philosophy of Science (1958), p. 11. I suspect that what she means by a “complete science” is the same as what I have referred to as the first sense of mechanistic science, above, note 1.

8 A.P.S.A. News, Department of Government, University of Sydney, 1959, Vol. IV, No. 4, pp. 13–14. In this note I drew attention to Bentley'a confusions on pp. 217–222, where he argues both for and against the conception of a “social whole.”

9 See, for example, the quotations in note 20, below.

10 See MacIver, R. M., The Web of Government (N. Y., 1947), p. 56 Google Scholar, and Leiserson, Avery, Administrative Regulation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 54.Google Scholar

11 See Western Political Quarterly, 1958, pp. 699–70.

12 I should perhaps here speak of a relatively autonomous political science, because of the presence of such exogenous variables as the psychological, economic, geographical, meteorological, etc., all of which influence the interactions of political bodies. But the problem is beyond the scope of this paper. See section 1 (b), above, and note.

13 In addition to the two deficiencies I shall remark, we may also notice those of “closure” and “completeness” mentioned by Brodbeck, op. cit., pp. 9 ff. As she puts it, “nothing that happens at any other time or place than those being considered affects the properties with which the theory is concerned.” Bentley's reductionism may be seen as an attempt to legislate all exogenous variables out of existence or into endogenous variables.

14 The Science and Method of Politics (N. Y., 1927), p. 251.

15 Although the quotation is from his Relativity in Man and Society (Putnam's, N. Y., 1926), p. 119–20, it is quite consistent with The Process of Government. Bentley's eccentric attachment to physics is, of course, self-evident in his later book.

16 Sec the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, VIII, p. 145.

17 “If psychological concepts are never used, we should have only the physics of human nature, not its psychology. Without psychological categories we could no more assert anything about what people are thinking or doing than we could assert anything about the temperature of a gas if we used only mechanical concepts.” Brodbeck, M. in Philosophy of Science, 1954, p. 149.Google Scholar

18 (N. Y., 1953); unless otherwise indicated, all references to Truman are to this book.

19 The only reason for selecting this chapter is that it ia shorter than those on the legislature or administration; but what I say of it applies equally to them.

20 Constitutional History of England (1827), ch. XVI; and compare R. G. Menzies's remark that “I know next door to nothing about science. True, I recall that the first law of physics is that ‘action and reaction are equal and opposite,’ but this is so true of politics that its scientific origin has become dulled in my mind.” University of Sydney Gazette, Nov., 1959.

21 “The war in fact is not to the finish, the socialism that extends itself to large portions of the population … ends in political compromise.” Bentley, p. 208; and cf. Truman, p. 504.

22 Leys, W. A. & Perry, C. M., Philosophy and the Public Interest, The Committee to Advance Original Work in Philosophy (Chicago, 1959), p. 37 Google Scholar, my emphasis.

23 See The Social Contract, IV, i, and notice again the quotation from Leys and Perry, above, note 22. The process of modification may be followed by consulting the references given in Truman's Index, s.v. “Interest groups: potential,” and “Rules of the game.”