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The Semantics of Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Charner Perry
Charner Perry
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

That an animal, presumably a cousin of the simians and certainly very similar to them, has developed societies in which millions and even hundreds of millions of individuals live and act together in orderly relation to each other is one of the astounding facts of history; and an impartial observer would hardly be surprised if the incredibly intricate network of cooperation, overstrained, should suddenly tear apart.

The aggregation of men into huge organized groups is, of course, relatively recent. For a million years or longer men or near-men lived an animal-like existence, scattered in small groups. It was not until fifteen or twenty thousand years ago that men, perhaps as a consequence of unprecedented pressure from the environment, organized groups of any considerable size; it is only within the last three or four thousand years that large-scale societies have existed; and it is only in the last three or four hundred years that complex orderly interplay and interaction among individuals and subgroups in societies have been developed.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 1950 , pp. 394 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1950

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References

1 Cf. Coulborn, Rushton, “Survival of the Fittest in the Atomic Age,” Ethics, Vol. 57, pp. 235–258 (July, 1947)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Graham, Frank D., Social Goals and Economic Institutions (Princeton, 1942), p. 5 Google Scholar.

3 Veblen, T., “Why Is Economics not an Evolutionary Science?”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 12, pp. 373, 396 (July, 1898)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 All three sentences are from the essay, “That Politics may be reduced to a Science,” Essays, Moral and Political, Part I, Essay III.

5 Pareto, Vilfredo, The Mind and Society [Trattato di sociologia generate] (New York, 1935)Google Scholar. An excellent brief account of Pareto's methodology is given by Henderson, Lawrence J., Pareto's General Sociology (Cambridge, 1935)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Merriam, Charles E., Systematic Politics (Chicago, 1945), pp. v, ix, 325 and passim Google Scholar.

7 No exact or complete analysis of the components of action is here intended; for detailed presentation of a view having important similarities to the one suggested see Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937), especially Ch. 19Google Scholar; for another view, similar in a quite different way, see Commons, John R., Institutional Economics (New York, 1934)Google Scholar.

8 Political science seems to be concerned with whatever social actions, techniques, and institutions are used by a society or civilization to bring order into, or to maintain equilibrium among, the lesser institutions and groups. Though similar disorders and sources of instability occur and recur in societies and more or less standard procedures for dealing with some of these disorders have been developed, the sources of disequilibrium, the kinds of disequilibrium occurring, and the possible means for dealing therewith vary widely as the institutions and historical circumstances of society change. Political scientists, like their fellow specialists, the military experts, should be on their guard against assuming that the next war or political crisis will be just like the last one.

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