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Creating Political Reality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Henry S. Kariel
Henry S. Kariel*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii
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Extract

“Suit yourself.”

—American colloquialism

Currently fashionable modes of political analysis deserve acclaim today for at least two reasons: they provide opportunities for participating in a pleasurable if strenuous activity (regardless of the value of the end results) and they effectively come to terms with the surface facts of political reality. Our posterity, too, may find it easy to esteem the contemporary products of the profession of political science should it ever look back and see how an affection for craftsmanship is combined with the ability to please. Moreover, the reward system of the profession should appear as having been nicely designed to promote the present display of talent, ingenuity, variety, and success. There is evidence, in any case, that the prevailing inclination to work hard and to develop ever more powerful analytical tools is welcomed and reinforced within the discipline. All would seem to be well.

Yet doubts continue to be expressed today even by those who govern the profession and engage in what Thomas Kuhn has called normal science. Partially, there is a petulant resentment among older practitioners, scholars who are made fretful and irritable by the entrepreneurial opportunism of the nouveau riche, by the feeling that mindless industriousness rather than scholarly contemplation is now rewarded by tenure as well as by space in journals, time on panels, positions on editorial boards, and cash for projects. It does not pain me, however, to disregard the indictment that comes from this source—not because I suspect its patrician origins but because I believe it is blind to the underlying impulse of empiricism, because it ignores the subversive, liberating thrust of empirical science.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , December 1970 , pp. 1088 - 1098
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1970

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Footnotes

*

This essay is drawn from a discussion paper prepared for a meeting of several members of the Caucus for a New Political Science at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, California, May 1–2, 1969. It was also subjected to helpful criticism by members of the Columbia University Seminar on Political and Social Thought, February 1970.

References

1 Schwartz, David C., “On the Ecology of Political Violence: ‘The Long Hot Summer’ as a Hypothesis,” American Behavioral Scientist, 11 (07-08 1968), 24–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his critique of the Kerner Commission report on civil disorders, Robert M. Fogelson has noted that the Commission, like social scientists who served it, viewed riots as mere reactions to ills manageable within the prevailing system of liberalism, that is, manageable without redistributing political power: see “Review Symposium,” this Review, 63 (12 1969), 1269–1275 Google Scholar.

2 The notion that reality has real attributes is rarely expressed as explicitly as in the following: “Some features of the world stand out, almost begging for names. Concepts clouds, thunder, table, dog, wealth, hunger, color, shape, and the like, name differentiated slices of reality that impinge willynilly on all of us.” Brodbeck, May in Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 3 (italics in original)Google Scholar. Similarly, nations, university departments, a market economy, or prevailing role differentiation are re-currently treated as if they were indubitably, imperturbably real.

3 Some of Harold D. Lasswell's overenthusiastic formulations in particular have provoked criticism: see Crick, Bernard, The American Science of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), pp. 197–209 Google Scholar.

4 See especially Deutsch, Karl W., The Nerves of Government (New York: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 139–140 Google Scholar; Polgar, Steven, “Health,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), Vol. VI, pp. 330–336 Google Scholar; and Jahoda, Marie, “Mental Health,” in Encyclopedia of Mental Health (New York: Watts, 1963), Vol. III, pp. 1067–1079 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 As Jeffrey Smith has pointed out to me, it is no less characteristic of developing human beings to strive for a sense of mastery; desiring to master a progressively richer role repertoire, they impose order on play, orgastic releases, and wayward impulses: cf. White, Robert W., Ego and Reality in Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: International Universities Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

6 See Edelman, Murray, “Public Policy and Political Violence,” discussion paper, Institute in Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, 1968 Google Scholar; and Goldberg, Arthur S., “Social Determinism and Rationality as Bases of Party Identification,” this Review, 63 (03 1969), 5–25 Google Scholar.

7 One serious effort to show how the dominant paradigmatic directives are being revised is Kalleberg, Arthur L., “Concept Formation in Normative and Empirical Studies,” this Review, 63 (03 1969), 26–39 Google Scholar.

8 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 198–199 Google Scholar; the quotation is said to come from Aristotle, Nicomachaen Ethics, 1172b36 ff.

9 Etzioni, Amitai, The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes (New York: Free Press, 1968), Chap. 21Google Scholar. See also Bay, Christian, “Needs, Wants, and Political Legitimacy,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 1 (09 1968), 241–260 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Corning, Peter A., “The Biological Bases of Behavior and Their Implications for Political Theory,” paper delivered at the American Political Science Association meeting, 09 2–6, 1969 Google Scholar.

10 For a consistently and hence usefully wrong-headed summary of Marcuse's work, see Cranston, Maurice, “Herbert Marcuse,” Encounter, 32 (03 1969), 38–50 Google Scholar.

11 Becker, Ernest, The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man (New York: George Braziller, 1968)Google Scholar.

12 Personal communication.

13 Outside of the traditions of Marxism and pragmatism, it is true, the problem of deriving norms from experience remains. Still, there are at least some discussions which have advanced the arguments about the naturalistic fallacy to a new level; see especially Edel, Abraham, Ethical Judgment: The Use of Science in Ethics (New York: Free Press, 1955)Google Scholar.

14 Preface to November-December 1968 issue of The American Behavioral Scientist.

15 See Tumin, Melvin, “Captives, Consensus and Conflict: Implications for New Rolea in Social Change,” in Stein, Herman D. (ed.), Social Theory and Social Invention (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968), pp. 93–113 Google Scholar.

16 See Bennis, Warren G. and Slater, Philip E., The Temporary Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1968)Google Scholar; White, Orion F., “The Dialectical Organization: An Alternative to Bureaucracy,” Public Administration Review, 29 (01–02 1969), 32–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966)Google Scholar.

17 It is not always acknowledged that social scientists engaged in mathematical enterprises are also participants. Seeking not to explain but to express meanings inherent in alternative structure of behavior, they play their roles in plain view of other members of their scientific community.

18 Kaplan, Harold, The Passive Voice (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966), p. 9 Google Scholar.

19 Quoted in The New York Times, May 3, 1970, p. D-9. I have argued for appropriating more of reality in “Expanding the Political Present,” this Review, 63 (09 1969), 768–776 Google Scholar, and in “Making Scenes,” Massachusetts Review, 11 (Spring 1970), 223–255 Google Scholar.

20 See Rubenstein, Robert and Lasswell, Harold D., The Sharing of Power in a Psychiatric Hospital (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

21 Their characteristic work, as Thomas M. Messer has pointed out, cannot be accommodated by galleries; moreover, it is perishable, if not self-destructive, “It is aimed against—or rather, it implicitly denies—the channels between artist and viewer, as well as the entire intermediary machinery consisting of dealers, critics and museums. What results is not simply opposition to the order of the day, but rather the creation of a dimension that renders such an order irrelevant and anachronistic.” Messer, Thomas M., “Impossible Art—Why It Is,” Art in America, 57 (05-06, 1969), 30–31 Google Scholar; see also the telling illustrations assembled by David L. Shirey, ibid., pp. 32–47.

22 “Beyond Omniscience: Notes toward a Future for the Novel,” TriQuarterly, 10 (Fall 1967), 37–52 Google Scholar; I am grateful to Paul F. Kress for alerting me to the relevance of this article.

23 Bakan, David, On Method (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1967), p. xiv Google Scholar.

24 Wolin, Sheldon S., “Political Theory as a Vocation,” this Review, 63 (12 1969), 1068 Google Scholar.

25 Williams, Raymond, “Parting of the Ways,” Commentary, 47 (02 1969), 73–75 Google Scholar.

26 What my metaphor intimates may be understood as aesthetic education: see Snell, Reginald, “Introduction” to Schiller, Friedrich, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Read, Herbert, Education through Art (London: Faber, 1943)Google ScholarPubMed; Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934)Google Scholar; and Marcuse, Herbert, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), Chap. 2Google Scholar.

27 Pointless activities—such as providing examples of the obvious—may of course be gratifying. Consider Harsanyi, John C., “Rational-Choice Models of Political Behavior vs. Functionalist and Conformist Theories,” World Politics, 21 (07 1969), 524–526 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as an example of a plea for perceiving symbolic, expressive action as mere “preoccupation.” Harsanyi would have us treat symbolic action alternatively as excessively costly, as “result of neurotic or psychotic conditions,” as “a way of making a social commitment” to achieve results, or as desperate acts by “extremist” groups which “have given up all hope of achieving their goals by reality-oriented instrumental activities, and so feel they have nothing to lose by turning to magic, ritual, ideology, and other forms of symbolic behavior.”